And Cajal’s exquisite, meticulous drawings of neurons in the brain and spinal cord proved to be powerful tools for persuasively communicating his vision to the scientific world. For that reason, Cajal was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine (an honor that, in an ironic twist, he shared with Golgi, who had invented the silver-staining technique that made Cajal’s observations possible). It would take another half-century until a new instrument, the electron microscope, could finally confirm what Cajal had seen in his mind’s eye - and carefully sketched out in thousands of stunning pen-and-ink diagrams.īut long before the synapse was visible, Cajal’s neuron doctrine had transformed scientists’ understanding of the nervous system and formed the bedrock upon which neuroscience is built. Because that gap between neurons is too small to see through a light microscope, Camillo Golgi and other rigorous scientists of Cajal’s day at first dismissed the neuron doctrine as a fantasy. Cajal’s two brilliant insights - that every neuron in the brain is separate and that neurons communicate across synapses - came to be known as the neuron doctrine.
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