Cajal and the Spanish Neurological School: Neuroscience Would Have Been a Different Story Without Them

Abstract

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was still young when he came across the reazione nera , discovered by the Italian Camillo Golgi. Cajal became absolutely entranced by the fine structure of the nervous system this technique revealed, which led him to embark on one of the last truly epic endeavors in Modern History: the characterization of nervous cells, and of their organization to form the brain. Cajal remained in Spain throughout his scientific career, working for years alone. With international recognition, Cajal began recruiting brilliant students as collaborators. A handful of his pupils also made decisive discoveries that served to lay the foundations of modern Neuroscience. Cajal’s brother Pedro, Tello, Domingo Sánchez, Achúcarro, Lafora, Río-Hortega, de Castro and Lorente de Nó worked side by side with El Maestro . While Cajal himself pronounced some of the basic rules that have helped us to understand the nervous system (the neuron theory, the law of dynamic polarization of the neuron), as well as providing innumerable details about the histological organization of the different neural structures, it was Pío del Río-Hortega who identified two of the four main cell types in the CNS (oligodendrocytes and microglia), and Fernando de Castro who described the innervation of the blood vessels and identified the first chemoreceptors in the carotid body. Together, this group of scientists is known as the Spanish Neurological School, and if they had not existed, the History of Neuroscience would surely have been quite a different story; and proof that Cajal was a truly exceptional scientist but he was not an exception for Spanish Science.

Fernando de Castro: Cajal's Man on the Peripheral Nervous System

“…However, the international recognition (Moscow Prize—1900, Helmholtz Medal—1905, and Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—1906) does not granted Cajal with the universal acceptance of his theories about the organization of the brain. The reticularists claimed for the syncytial connectivity between the different neural structures, as was the case for Camillo Golgi (who shared with Cajal the Nobel Prize in 1906), and as the uncontested paladin of “the neuron theory,” Santiago Ramón y Cajal remained active in this neuronist‐vs.‐reticularists war for the rest of his life (de Castro, ; de Castro, in press; Ramón y Cajal, ). The esprit d'école was one of the main characteristics of the Spanish Neurological School, and in this scenario, all its members were implicated in this capital scientific controversy, extending it to every terrain of work.…”

“…With the international recognition of Santiago Ramón y Cajal for his extraordinary scientific performance (International Moscow Prize, 1900) the Spanish government allocated budget to build a fully equipped laboratory in Madrid to continue with the studies on the fine structure of the nervous system and to contract collaborators to help the maestro in his feat (Andrés‐Barquin, ; de Castro, in press; Ramón y Cajal, ). The first one to arrive was Francisco Tello but fast there were a plethora of young enthusiastic collaborators dreaming to be neurohistologists, neurologists or what we currently know as neuroscientists: Nicolás Achúcarro, Gonzalo R. Lafora, Pío del Río‐Hortega, and the youngsters Fernando de Castro and Rafael Lorente de Nó, to circumscribe these names to the main characters in what we know under the collective name of Spanish Neurological School or, in colloquial terms, Cajal School or the School of Madrid (de Carlos and Pedraza, ; de Castro, in press).…”

The Women Neuroscientists in the Cajal School

“…At this point he was the paladin of the “neuron doctrine,” which proposed that neural tissue is formed of individual cells –or neurons- and not of syncytial networks. Nevertheless, most of the researchers active in the field at that time were still open or cryptic “reticularists” (Shepherd, 1991; de Castro, 2019a,b). The prestige of Cajal was boosted by the award of the Moscow International Prize (1900), the Helmholtz Medal from the German Imperial Leopoldina Academia (1905) and the still recently founded Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1906), sharing the latter with maybe the most visible leader of the reticularists, the great Italian histologist Camillo Golgi (1843–1926).…”

“…The prestige of Cajal was boosted by the award of the Moscow International Prize (1900), the Helmholtz Medal from the German Imperial Leopoldina Academia (1905) and the still recently founded Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1906), sharing the latter with maybe the most visible leader of the reticularists, the great Italian histologist Camillo Golgi (1843–1926). However, Cajal’s scientific production was particularly remarkable in the 19th century, along which Spain lost its empire (in the period between 1815 and 1898: de Castro, 2019a,b).…”

“…This international academic recognition of Cajal drove the Spanish authorities to adopt measures to support the acclaimed neuroscientist at the zenith of his career. As such, the King of Spain, Alfonso 13 (1886–1941), and the Prime Minister, Francisco Silvela (1843–1905), convinced the Spanish government to establish and fully furbish a modern Histology laboratory for Cajal in 1901 (De Carlos and Pedraza, 2014; de Castro, 2019a,b). The first collaborator recruited by Cajal to the laboratory in 1902 was Jorge Francisco Tello (1880–1958) and subsequently, the number of collaborators multiplied with the foundation of the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios-JAE (Council for Extended Studies), the presidency of which was entrusted almost immediately to Cajal himself (Figure 1A: Ramón y Cajal, 1917).…”