The rebellious boy with a homemade cannon who mapped the brain's cells
In 1863, aged eleven, Santiago Ramón y Cajal was locked up for blowing apart a neighbour's gate with a cannon he had built himself. The same restless boy loved to draw, a talent his father dismissed, and decades later those drawing skills would reveal how the brain is wired.
His father tried discipline first, apprenticing him to a shoemaker and a barber, then steered him toward medicine by having him sketch human bones in 1868. Cajal graduated from the University of Zaragoza in 1873 at 21, served as an army doctor on an expedition to Cuba where he caught malaria and tuberculosis, and earned his doctorate in Madrid in 1877. He married Silveria Fañanás García, and they raised twelve children.
The turning point came in Barcelona in 1887, when he learned Camillo Golgi's staining technique. Potassium dichromate and silver nitrate turn a scattered few neurons jet black while leaving their neighbours clear, so single cells stand out from an otherwise impenetrable tangle. Cajal refined the method and drew what he saw across many species and most regions of the brain. Hundreds of those tree-like drawings of branching cells are still used in teaching.
What the drawings showed was contentious. The reigning reticular theory held that nerve tissue formed one continuous network; Cajal argued that nerve cells are separate units that meet without fusing. He also discovered the growth cone at the tip of a lengthening axon, and a pacemaker cell in the gut wall that now bears his name. In 1906 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Golgi himself, an awkward pairing since Golgi still defended the network view. Cajal became the first Spaniard to win a scientific Nobel.
Born in Petilla de Aragón, Navarre, on 1 May 1852, he held professorships in Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid and in 1922 founded the laboratory later renamed the Cajal Institute. He also experimented with hypnotic suggestion, using it to ease his wife's labour pains. He died in Madrid on 17 October 1934, aged 82, still working. A lunar crater has carried his name since 1973, and his childhood home in Ayerbe opened as a museum in 2013.
Source: Santiago Ramón y Cajal
