Everything about Santiago Ram N Y Cajal totally explained
Santiago Ramón y Cajal (
May 1 1852 –
October 17 1934) was a
Spanish histologist,
physician, and
Nobel laureate. He is considered to be one of the founders of
neuroscience.
Biography
The son of Justo Ramón and Antonia Cajal, Ramón y Cajal was born of Aragonese parents in
Petilla de Aragón, a
Navarrese enclave in
Aragon,
Spain. As a child he was transferred between many different schools because of his poor behaviour and
anti-authoritarian attitude. An extreme example of his precociousness and rebelliousness is his imprisonment at the age of eleven for destroying the town gate with a homemade
cannon. He was an avid painter, artist, and
gymnast. He worked for a time as a shoemaker and barber, and was well known for his pugnacious attitude.
Ramón y Cajal attended the medical school of
Zaragoza, from which he graduated in 1873. After a competitive examination, he served as a medical
officer in the
Spanish Army. He took part in an expedition to Cuba in 1874-75, where he contracted
malaria and
tuberculosis. After returning to Spain he married Silveria Fañanás García in 1879, with whom he'd four daughters and three sons. He was appointed as a
university professor at
Valencia in 1881, and in 1883 he received his
medical degree in
Madrid. He later held professorships in both
Barcelona and Madrid. He was Director of the Zaragoza Museum (1879), Director of the National Institute of Hygiene (1899), and founder of the (1922) (later renamed to the, or
Cajal Institute). He died in Madrid in 1934.
Works and theories
Ramón y Cajal's most famous studies were on the fine structure of the
central nervous system. Cajal used a histological staining technique developed by his contemporary
Camillo Golgi. Golgi found that by treating
brain tissue with a
silver chromate solution, a relatively small number of
neurons in the brain were darkly stained. This allowed Golgi to resolve in detail the structure of individual neurons and led him to conclude that nervous tissue was a continuous reticulum (or web) of interconnected
cells much like those in the
circulatory system.
Using
Golgi's method, Ramón y Cajal reached a very different conclusion. He postulated that the
nervous system is made up of billions of separate
neurons and that these cells are "dynamically polarized", for example, they receive information at their cell bodies and
dendrites, and transmit it unidirectionally towards other sites via their
axons. Rather than forming a continuous web, Cajal suggested that neurons communicate with each other via specialized junctions called
synapses, a term that was coined by
Sherrington in
1897. This
hypothesis became the basis of the
neuron doctrine, which states that the individual unit of the nervous system is a single neuron.
Electron microscopy later showed that a
plasma membrane completely enclosed each neuron, supporting Cajal's
theory, and weakening Golgi's reticular theory.
However, with the discovery of
electrical synapses (gap junctions: direct junctions between nerve cells), some have argued that Golgi was at least partially correct. For this work Ramón y Cajal and Golgi shared the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in
1906.
Ramón y Cajal also proposed that the way
axons grow is via a
growth cone at their ends. He understood that neural cells could sense chemical signals that indicated a direction for growth, a process called
chemotaxis.
Distinctions and books
Among his many distinctions and societal memberships, Ramón y Cajal was also made an
honorary Doctor of Medicine of the Universities of
Cambridge and
Würzburg and honorary
Doctor of Philosophy of the
Clark University.
He published over 100 scientific works and articles in
French,
Spanish, and
German. Among his most notable were
Rules and advices on scientific investigation,
Histology,
Degeneration and regeneration of the nervous system,
Manual of normal histology and micrographic technique,
Elements of histology,
Manual of general pathological anatomy,
New ideas on the fine anatomy of the nerve centres,
Textbook on the nervous system of man and the vertebrates, and
The retina of vertebrates.
In 1905, he published five science-fictional "Vacation Stories" under the pen name "Dr. Bacteria."
The
asteroid 117413 Ramonycajal is named in his honour.
Gallery of drawings by Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Image:CajalHippocampus.jpeg|Drawing of the neural circuitry of the rodent hippocampus., Vols. 1 and 2. A. Maloine. Paris. 1911.
Image:CajalCerebellum.jpg|Drawing of the cells of the chick cerebellum, from "", Madrid, 1905.
Image:SparrowTectum.jpg|Drawing of a section through the optic tectum of a sparrow, from "", Madrid, 1905.
Image:Cajal Retina.jpg|From "Structure of the Mammalian Retina" Madrid, 1900.
Image:PurkinjeCell.jpg|Drawing of Purkinje cells (A) and granule cells (B) from pigeon cerebellum by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1899. Instituto Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Madrid, Spain.
Image:Cajal-Retzius cell drawing by Cajal 1891.gif|Drawing of Cajal-Retzius cells, 1891.
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