The Renaissance Mind Behind Modern Neuroscience

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the neuroscience trailblazer, found inspiration in the midst of what some might call chaos. Instead of seeing complexity as a problem, he saw it as artistry, and that perspective transformed his field. But long before he became the famous scientist we admire today, a 16-year-old Cajal was wandering around graveyards, thanks to his dad's unique teaching methods. Surrounded by ancient bones and tombstones, he was busy sketching away, completely unaware that he was taking the first steps on his path to scientific greatness.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852 – 1934), often called the father of modern neuroscience was a trained barber, shoemaker, passionate artist, specialist in color photography, prolific writer, talented pathologist, and histologist specializing in neuroanatomy and the central nervous system. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906.

Cajal began to draw early, and by the age of three amazed his parents with quite detailed and technically correct drawings. Having mastered the written word, he wrote small poems and stories, continuing his writing into adulthood. He gave his parents hard times by frequently misbehaving in school, being rebellious, having problems with authority and discipline, and often missing classes. He would later write about himself in his autobiography: "I jumped like a grasshopper, climbed like a monkey, ran like a gazelle.”

His passion for drawing began to look like an obsession, he was drawing everywhere, even on the walls. His father sent the disobedient teenager to vocational training, first as a barber and then as a shoemaker. After ascertaining that he had mastered these professions, Santiago’s father rejoiced at his son's change of attitude and began to teach him anatomy. He would even take the 16-year-old boy to graveyards where the bones of ancient burials had come to the surface, and made him draw the bones.

It was also at 16 that Cajal entered the University of Saragossa, where his father was professor of applied anatomy. Anatomy fascinated the young man, but bubbling with creativity he kept combining it with his inclinations to painting and writing. Cajal recalled in his autobiographical memoirs:

“I have written a voluminous biological novel. It recounts the dramatic adventures of a traveler who inexplicably arrives on the planet Jupiter and encounters humanoid monsters tens of thousands of times larger than man. In relation to such colossi the traveler had the size of a microbe and was invisible. The hero penetrated the blood of the monsters through the skin glands and, traveling on the erythrocyte, observed the battles of white blood cells and parasites, visual, auditory, muscular and other functions and finally arrived in the brain and discovered the secret of thought and volitional impulse. Numerous color drawings illustrated the adventures of the hero, more than once escaping the viscous tentacles of leukocytes. It’s a pity I lost this book, it could have been published with modern revisions.”

After receiving his medical degree at the age of 21 (in 1873), Cajal went to serve in Catalonia and then Cuba in the expeditionary forces. He suddenly became seriously ill with malaria, which left him disabled (suffering from malaria attacks all his life) and returned home early. It was then that his scientific career truly began to blossom. Being both an artist and pathologist, Cajal became the first person to discern the neuron. Working under the light of a gas lamp, he made thin slices of brain tissue and exposed them to the same silver nitrate solution used to produce images on photographic plates. Staring intently through a microscope at the silver-stained tissue, Cajal discerned a multitude of intricately intertwined black figures that resembled a swarm of needle-like insects frozen in translucent amber.

Other scientists who had studied similar preparations saw this picture as nothing more than an incredibly tangled network of continuous fibers that were thought to transmit nerve energy throughout the brain, vibrating like strands of spider web. But Cajal, in his slices, which seemed to depict only images of chaos, looked for different forms and connections with an artist's penetrating eye. This is when he discovered neurons - unique cells, each a separate, unique pearl, striking the eye with its incredibly complex beauty. Many of Santiago's scientific works were accompanied by colorful and very detailed pictures, similar to the paintings of Bosch or Dürer. Such a wonderful example of polymathic integration!

Astonishingly, Ramón y Cajal, having left a bright trace in medicine and biology, also became famous as a specialist in color photography, writing the first instructional manual for it in 1912. He also invented a new version of the phonograph. Cajal became a passionate science popularizer, giving lectures and writing articles and books. Perhaps his two best-known books are “Conversations at the Café" and “The World as Seen at Eighty: Impressions of an Arteriosclerotic”.

In 1906, Cajal, together with C. Golgi, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the structure of the nervous system. In the same year, his candidacy was submitted for the post of Spanish Minister of Education, but he refused. His legacy cannot be understated, his work remains the absolute basis of neuroscience. His famous quote on the brain is also art related:

“Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.”

Encounter a captivating array of historical and contemporary polymaths within these pages: WHY POLYMATHS?