Dynamic Neurons

Brain Research Bulletin, 2006

Exactly 100 years ago, the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Santiago Ramón y Cajal, "in recognition of his meritorious work on the structure of the nervous system". Cajal's great contribution to the history of science is undoubtedly the postulate of neuron theory. The present work makes a historical analysis of the circumstances in which Cajal formulated his theory, considering the authors and works that influenced his postulate, the difficulties he encountered for its dissemination, and the way it finally became established. At the time when Cajal began his neurohistological studies, in 1887, Gerlach's reticular theory (a diffuse protoplasmic network of the grey matter of the nerve centres), also defended by Golgi, prevailed among the scientific community. In the first issue of the Revista Trimestral de Histología Normal y Patológica (May, 1888), Cajal presented the definitive evidence underpinning neuron theory, thanks to staining of the axon of the small, star-shaped cells of the molecular layer of the cerebellum of birds, whose collaterals end up surrounding the Purkinje cell bodies, in the form of baskets or nests. He thus demonstrated once and for all that the relationship between nerve cells was not one of continuity, but rather of contiguity. Neuron theory is one of the principal scientific conquests of the 20th century, and which has withstood, with scarcely any modifications, the passage of more than a 100 years, being reaffirmed by new technologies, as the electron microscopy. Today, no neuroscientific discipline could be understood without recourse to the concept of neuronal individuality and nervous transmission at a synaptic level, as basic units of the nervous system.

Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, 2020

Neuroscience is the scientific research movement emerging in the United States around Francis Otto Schmitt (1903-1995) at the MIT in the 1960s. It was thought as an unifying framework first centred on molecular biology, and extending its scope progressively to virtually all novel aspects of the study of the nervous system including cognition, behaviour and therefore neurology, psychology and psychiatry. The Neuroscience Research Program of Schmitt was in fact an epistemological project of interdisciplinarity in the brain sciences rooted in the basic science researches and clinical investigations of the early XXth century, mainly developing in the XXth century around the major breakthroughs in neurophysiology and in cellular neuroscience between the 1930s and the 1990s rewarded by numerous Nobel Prizes in this domain. Recently, molecular and cellular neuroscience also focus on establishing contacts between animal studies and investigations in man with the revolutionary neuroimaging techniques. From a broader perspective, the association of medical procedures and disciplines in the study of the brain can be traced back to Antiquity with famous experiments such as the observation of an epileptic goat in the Hippocratic Corpus or the observation of the effects of cerebellar lesions in the dog by Pourfour du Petit in XVIIIth century, France. Historical enquiries help understand how different experimental approaches and clinical investigations were combined in the study of the nervous system at each time period, and this is what the history of neuroscience means.

Motor control, 1998

Comptes rendus biologies, 2006

Les étapes de la construction physiologique du concept de neurone sont décrites. Les idées initiales sur la fonction de la cellule nerveuse aboutissent aux polémiques sur la théorie du neurone et les prétentions spéculatives de l'histophysiologie. Les programmes de recherche de Sherrington et Adrian émergent d'un contexte britannique spécifique et se confrontent à l'oscillographie américaine et au rythme de Berger. Au terme de polémiques multiples, le neurone se constitue par la technique intracellulaire et l'incorporation de concepts issus d'autres sous-disciplines. L'analyse de ces voies démontre les interactions entre disciplines sous-jacentes comme des facteurs essentiels.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2006

This course examines the expansion and proliferation of the neurosciences from the early modern period to the present. We will investigate the recent claim that we are living in the midst of a "neuro-revolution" with vast social, political, and economic consequences around the globe. Yet at the same time, we will look to the past for similar moments of transition and transformation of the modern sciences abetted by experiments on the nervous system. Students will analyze texts from Descartes to Damasio, paying attention to the rhetorical explanatory power of certain epistemic objects and instruments--samples of brain tissue, synaptic networks, clinical case histories, MRI scans--as well as the institutional power-shifts that sanctioned research practices such as vivisection, phrenology, electrophysiology, and functional imaging. Through our reading of primary sources by philosophers and physicians and secondary sources by historians and sociologists, this course will explore what is at stake in the "neuro-turn," and why it provokes such a mixed reaction of hope and hype, then as well as now.

Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2002

Berichte der Bunsengesellschaft für …, 1985