Santiago Ramón y Cajal

The would-be artist from rural Spain who became the father of modern neuroscience — proving that the brain is made of separate cells and drawing them with unmatched beauty.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) was born in Petilla de Aragón, a small village in northern Spain. As a boy he wanted to be an artist and was, by his own account, a troublemaker — he was once jailed for destroying a neighbour's gate with a homemade cannon. His father, a doctor and anatomy teacher, steered him into medicine, using bones dug from a graveyard to teach him anatomy. Cajal kept drawing all his life.

The neuron doctrine

After serving as an army doctor in Cuba, where he caught malaria, Cajal became a professor of anatomy. In 1887 he saw Golgi's silver stain for the first time and set about perfecting it. Working mostly alone, publishing at first in a journal he paid to print himself, he examined the retina, the cerebellum, the spinal cord, the cortex and more. From these studies he argued that neurons are independent cells that communicate at contact points, and that signals pass in one direction through each cell — ideas central to modern neuroscience.

Drawings as science

Cajal produced thousands of drawings of neurons and glia. They combine accuracy with a strong sense of design, and many are still reproduced in textbooks and have toured the world as art exhibitions. He also described the growth cone, the searching tip of a growing axon, and proposed that learning might involve changes in the connections between neurons — an early version of the idea of synaptic plasticity.

Honours and advice

He shared the 1906 Nobel Prize with Camillo Golgi. His short book Advice for a Young Investigator (1897), still in print, urges persistence over genius and warns against "diseases of the will" that stop scientists from finishing their work.