Camillo Golgi           

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1906 was awarded jointly to Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal "in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system"

Abstract



Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal were the two main investigators that revealed the morphological organization of the cerebellar cortex, although they never shared the same basic concepts. While for Golgi all axons fused into a large syncytium (the diffuse nerve network), for Cajal they had free endings and communication between neurons was done by contiguity not by continuity. The classical diagrammatic representation of the cerebellar circuitry shown by Cajal in his Croonian lecture (1894), although still valid, has drastically change by the accumulation of the great amount of data generated from 1894 to our days. The topic of this review is to briefly summarize this new knowledge, and to confront it with Cajal's concepts, to determine whether or not the added complexity to the circuit invalidates the Cajal's principles. Our conclusion is that although most of these principles are consolidated, the applicability of the law of dynamic polarization does not adapt to some of them.