Santiago Ramón y Cajal: neuroscientist and artist

Playwright Justin Fleming has written a play about Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish neuroscientist who performed studies of brain anatomy that ultimately won him the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 

Detailed drawing of the human cortex taken from Ramón y Cajal's Comparative study of the sensory areas of the human cortex. Top: Nissl-stained motor cortex of a human adult. Bottom: Golgi-stained cortex of a 1.5-month-old infant.

"In a profile (“Critical Connections,” The Scientist, November/December 2011) of Harvard neuroscientist Josh Sanes, one of the developers of the labeling technique that resulted in mice with technicolor neurons, blows his own kiss to Cajal, saying that the 21st-century technique allows one 'to distinguish individual neurons out of a morass. Just like what Cajal did with his Golgi stain. . . . Cajal was an incredible genius in that he could look at one neuron in each of 100 mice and then go home and draw a picture that synthesized all of that information. And almost always he got that right.'"



read the full story at The Scientist : http://the-scientist.com/2012/03/23/nervy-production/