Santiago Ramon y Cajal and The beautiful Brain: At the crossroad of science and Art
In the mornings, you would have tiptoed into his lab, making your way to one of its corners, observing him while dawn slowly makes its way to dusk. You would see how every morning he diligently prepared his slides of cells, stained them and then spent hours looking at them through his microscope. Delving deep into the world of brain cells unrevealing more about the nervous system. And halfway through the day, he would start drawing, analyzing the cells under the lenses, and redrawing. He would continue until he had encapsulated the minute details of not just a single slide but the array of slides that could describe that precise cell with utmost vivacity. Certainly, he didn’t know that this craftsmanship of pencil and pen describing the densely packed network of specialized cells we home between our ears will stand as a graphic wonder, unrivalled even years after his death and would always be considered among the world’s most remarkable scientific illustrations. The Beautiful Brain — an intriguing collection of drawings by the neuro-anatomist Santiago Ramoni Cajal left the artists and scientists equally spellbound.
Cajal as a child had an obstreperous nature; he was asked by several schools to leave. Once, he blew one of his neighbour’s gardens with a handmade canon and even was imprisoned for it. His father would take the unruly child to graveyards to draw bones, and it helped, or at least it piqued the interest of the artist within him. Later on his father’s behest, he enrolled to study medicine at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, where his father, a doctor by profession, lectured in Applied anatomy. He might have entered the world of medicine at his father’s request, but he stayed because it satiated his artistic eye and scientific mind. He was drawn to histology, the study of tissue and ultimately to brain research.
In 1872, a Spanish scientist, Camillo Golgi, working from his hospital’s kitchen — a makeshift laboratory- discovered the black reaction. His staining method involved hardening the nervous tissue with potassium dichromate and then covering it with silver nitrate solution; the stain lit up the tiny universe under the microscope. It stained random cells black against a yellow backdrop. Armed with this knowledge and with his most prized possession-his microscope by his side, Cajal sat out to traverse the terrain left bare in front of him, tracing out the nervous system to its finest detail.
He used Golgi’s stain to study the brain tissues for years and developed the neuron doctrine, which states that the brain consists of different cells or neurons. It ironically clashed with Golgi’s school of thought -the reticular theory, which was the notion that the nervous system is made of a single continuous network. It led to a protracted intellectual commotion between the two brilliant scientists. The scientific rivalry didn’t end even after both were collectively awarded the Nobel prize in Physiology in 1906. They shared the Nobel because while one lit the way, the other traversed it. In the end, Ramón y Cajal’s theory prevailed. Electron microscopy makes it abundantly clear that the brain is, in fact, a network of distinct cells that communicate with one another rather than a continuous network.
I first learned about Santiago Cajal while reading- “A mind for numbers” by Barbara Oakley, and then couldn’t resist reading more about him. I was deeply inspired by him. His scientific endeavors were fascinating, as were his intricately drawn masterpieces, but his grit influenced me the most. He didn’t fit the conventional definition of genius. He would often despise his modest intellect and lack of clarity in words. He once said -
“Deficiencies of innate ability may be compensated for through persistent hard work and concentration. One might say that work substitutes for talent, or better yet, that it creates talent.”
When you think about it, you will realize these words are a powerhouse of motivation for young researchers like us. It helped me to discern that it is not what you are born with but rather how much you are willing to work for primarily dictates the degree of success you reach in your desired task.
