If the actor Lon Chaney was the man with a thousand faces in cinema, Santiago Ramón y Cajal was the man with a thousand faces, arms and legs in the world of science and culture of his time. His legacy, thought and skills have filled thousands of pages in hundreds of books. In this way, apart from being the father of modern neuroscience , there is a science fiction novelist Cajal, a chess player Cajal, an inventor Cajal, a photographer Cajal… And so, even an endless list of activities that define a polymath, as was our most universal scientist. And on that list is, how could it be otherwise, the dissemination and transfer of scientific knowledge.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal wrote dozens of books and specific treatises on his specialty, among which we find some of a more didactic type with resources typical of the most current dissemination genre, what he called “histological popularization”. He dared to use metaphors and comparisons to make his presentations more understandable. And in an exercise in lyricism, he has left for posterity expressions such as referring to the connections between neurons as “kisses” or, even better known, calling pyramidal neurons “butterflies of the soul” . This type of neuron was discovered and described by Cajal in 1888. Its name is due to the triangle-shaped arrangement of its cell body. They are related to functions related to cognition and brain plasticity, being the most typical and abundant neurons of the cerebral cortex. Cajal went further in his description and referred to them as «cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose flapping of wings who knows if one day will clarify the secret of mental life. (…) Because, even from the plastic point of view, the nervous tissue contains incomparable beauties. Is there any tree in our parks more elegant and leafy than the Purkinje corpuscle of the cerebellum or the psychic cell, that is, the famous cerebral pyramid? Science told like a poem.
pseudoscientific narratives
In Holiday Tales (1905) we find a compilation of five stories described by Cajal himself as “pseudo-scientific narratives”, where we find a good example of the author’s effort to bring science to the general public and stimulate critical thinking . These are speculative fiction stories that hide scientific elements and moral dilemmas. It would be daring to call this book science fiction but, to tell the truth, it is quite close to the genre and some authors dare to compare it with the work of HG Wells. In the story The Cursed House , a young doctor ruined as a result of an untimely shipwreck buys a supposedly haunted house, which nobody wants to inhabit. Our protagonist discovers, using his scientific knowledge of chemistry and microbiology, that everything can be explained by natural causes.
admirer of verne
An argument similar to that found in the novel The Castle of the Carpathians (1892), by Jules Verne, where we could think that Cajal, an admirer of Verne, found his inspiration, if it were not because The Cursed House is earlier. In his autobiography, the Spaniard tells that between 1871 and 1873 he lost a manuscript with a science-fiction story written and illustrated by him.
Jules Verne’s scientific novels, very much in vogue at the time, exerted even greater influence on my tastes. It was so great that, in imitation of the works From the Earth to the Moon , Five Weeks in a Balloon , Around the World in Eighty Days , etc., I wrote a voluminous biological novel, of a didactic nature, in which the dramatic adventures of a certain traveler who, arriving, it is not known how, on the planet Jupiter, ran into monstrous animals, ten thousand times larger than man, although essentially identical in structure. In comparison with those colossi of life, our explorer had the size of a microbe: he was, therefore, invisible. Armed with all sorts of scientific apparatus, the intrepid protagonist began his exploration by sneaking through a skin gland; then invaded the blood; I was sailing on a red blood cell; witnessed the epic fights between leukocytes and parasites; it attended to the admirable visual, acoustic, muscular functions, etc., and, finally, when it arrived at the brain, it surprised—nothing there!—the secret of thought and voluntary impulse. Numerous color drawings, taken and arranged —of course— from the histological works of the time (Henle, Van Kempen, Kölliker, Frey, etc.), illustrated the text and showed live the moving adventures of the protagonist, who, threatened more than once by the viscous tentacles of a leukocyte or a vibrating corpuscle, he escaped danger thanks to ingenious tricks.
I am sorry to have lost this little book, because perhaps it could have become, in the light of the new revelations of histology and bacteriology, a work of entertaining scientific popularization. I was doubtless lost during my travels as a military doctor».
An amazing journey through the human body
A man the size of a microbe traveling through the bloodstream on the back of a red blood cell and facing gigantic beings identical in structure to humans? Do you fight between leukocytes and parasites? Does the argument ring a bell? It is inevitable not to compare it with the film Fantastic Voyage (Richard Fleischer, 1966), which the popularizer and writer Isaac Asimov later adapted into a homonymous novel.
Cajal also predicted a dystopian future in Life in the year 6000 , a story written between 1878 and 1884 and which was rescued in 1973 by “Nana” Ramón y Cajal — the Nobel’s granddaughter — and her husband. The protagonist of this work remains in a dehydrated state of hibernation for thousands of years and wakes up in the year 6000. In this new life, the figure of Dr. Micrococus appears, who will act as a guide to show the nineteenth-century traveler the benefits of the science of the future, in a world where disease is defined by mathematical calculations and where there is only one medical career, Mechanical Biology, in charge of genetic manipulation and cloning. Dr. Micrococcus teaches the protagonist wonderful diagnostic equipment and the application of telemedicine. The counterpoint to this seemingly perfect society is the elimination of distractions and unproductive time wasters, such as art or poetry.
Doctor Bacteria articles
More focused on histological popularization we find The Wonders of Histology (1883), a series of articles, which under the pseudonym of Dr. Bacteria, were published during 1883 in the weekly magazine La Clínica . In one of them, titled The Cellular Theory and published on August 5, 1883, we find such juicy fragments as this: «It is not true that you, the uninitiated in the secrets of life, have asked yourselves many times, what is hides inside those fragile and ephemeral machines called organized beings? Where is the hidden spring, the inner energy that maintains them through time and space in open struggle with physicochemical forces? Who inhabits those magnificent constructions that form the plant and the animal, the airy and graceful bird, the beautiful and perfumed flower, and the most grandiose and severe mammal? (…)
To learn some of these wise answers, come with us to the cabinet of a micrograph. There, on the stage of the microscope, tear the petal of a flower, without considering its beauty or its aroma; take a piece of the tissues of an animal: do not respect those deadly remains; put it on the rack of the microscope slide and dissociate it mercilessly even though its fibers throb and shudder at the contact of the needles, now look through the eyepiece window and… a remarkable thing, an unforeseen result, the leaf of the vegetable as well as the animal tissue will reveal to you all parts an identical construction, a kind of hive made up of cells and more cells separated by a sparse interstitial mortar, and housing in its cavities, not the honey of the bee, but the honey of life (…) this tiresome repetition of the same theme structural with very slight variations, it is the primordial truth of histology, it is the fact on which the famous cell theory is based».
A great informative work
The written production of Ramón y Cajal stands out for a remarkable mastery of language and the differentiation between scientific precision and literary precision. His most scientific and academic texts brim with a clear and specific style, far from adjectives, which we could call scientific classicism. We can question his more literary audacity, but at this point it is worth remembering that he was elected academician of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1905 , although he never took possession of his chair.
Another resource of popular science is the one that materializes through the art of graphics and illustration. The drawings of nerve cells in Cajal’s texts went a long way toward convincing the rest of the scientific community that he was correct in his assumptions. But he was not only the artist who exactly copied the object in front of him, Cajal went further, being able to focus on the details to capture all its essence. His drawings are true works of art. And the similarity of the structures that he represented on paper with the images obtained with modern techniques is amazing. So good was his graphic work that for a time the scientific community of his time thought they saw unrealistic artistic interpretations in his drawings. Something with so much detail, so precise and beautiful could not be real.
As president of the Board for the Expansion of Scientific Studies and Research (JAE), from its foundation in 1907 to 1934, Santiago Ramón y Cajal was very clear about the importance of the communication of scientific knowledge and its transmission to society as a way to achieve the regeneration of Spain. The JAE, among its multiple functions, organized seminars and conferences, and brought some of the most illustrious scientific figures of the moment . The most famous and with the greatest impact was Albert Einstein , who in 1923 visited Spain with intense media coverage, which surely aroused more than one vocation among the readers of the chronicles not exempt from mathematical language. Some chronicles that are studied in the faculties of Communication and that authors such as Carlos Elías, professor of Journalism at the Carlos III University of Madrid, directly relate to the subsequent development of Physics in our country.
In addition, Cajal actively participated in Spanish scientific policy with the intention of creating a modern infrastructure. From his initiatives, before and after his political position as senator, came the creation and modernization of the Alfonso XIII National Institute of Hygiene , in 1899, which is currently the Carlos III Health Institute. And in 1920, he assumed the direction of the Biological Research Laboratory, currently the Cajal Institute of the CSIC.
Don Santiago only needed to record a podcast , another interesting medium for the popularization of science. And although it seems crazy, who knows if it was not close. Because, and few people know it, he theoretically perfected Edison’s phonograph, capable of reproducing previously recorded sounds. Cajal thought of changing the recording system from a wax cylinder to a flat metal disk to improve sound quality. He abandoned the project because he couldn’t find a technician who understood his idea and built that record. But a few years later, he was able to see his idea executed on Emile Bernier’s gramophone, the evolution of the phonograph.
To end this review of the interesting disseminating slope of the polyhedral Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the reflection of another polymath, José Ramón Alonso Peña, professor of Cell Biology at the University of Salamanca and one of the best scientific disseminators in our country. A few words published eight years ago in jralonso.es and that perfectly sum up, in my opinion, Don Santiago’s commitment to popularizing science: «In these times of ours, where few newspapers have pages dedicated to science or where some responsible of the grills seem to think that a television program on biology can only be a lion eating a gazelle, that someone like Cajal understood and practiced scientific dissemination should be a message for the university community, the educated population and those responsible for culture and a message encouragement for that group of authors, institutions and readers who value that science is culture and consider, like Santiago Ramón y Cajal, that dissemination is not opposed to research, but rather supports and complements it».
