COLVCF-01-07-2020
VIRTUAL CREATIVE FACTORY
Santiago Ramón y Cajal was a Spanish histologist and physician who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 for establishing the neuron as the primary structural and functional unit of the nervous system123. He was born in May 1852 in the village of Petilla, in the region of Aragon in northeast Spain. His father was at that time the village surgeon (later on, in 1870, his father was appointed as Professor of Dissection at the University of Zaragoza)1.
Cajal’s early scientific studies were devoted to inflammation and to the structure of muscle fibers. In 1887, he made a fundamental discovery with his peculiar talent and intuition that revolutionized the field of neuroscience. He discovered that the relationship between nerve cells was not continuous, or a single system as per then extant reticular theory, but rather contiguous; there were gaps between neurons14. This discovery led to the development of the neuron doctrine, which states that the nervous system is made up of discrete individual cells, or neurons, which communicate with each other through specialized junctions called synapses1.
Cajal’s work in neuroplasticity was groundbreaking. He demonstrated that the brain is not a static organ, but rather a dynamic one that can change and adapt throughout life1. He also showed that the brain has the ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections in response to changes in the environment or in response to injury1.
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