Editorial: The Major Discoveries of Cajal and His Disciples: Consolidated Milestones for the Neuroscience of the XXIst Century

When Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1904; 1911) began to understand the fine structure of the nervous system in the last decades of the XIXth century, he was almost certainly alone in his conviction that his descriptions were scientific truths, many of which have outlived him and remain relevant. Simple histological staining, a monocular microscope, an unabated curiosity, patience and a special talent to represent his observations in sketches, and drawings, as well as a rich imaginative and open mind, all elements that together account for Cajal's success. His descriptions of the connectivity in the nervous system were compiled into an opus magna that was first published in 1904 (“Textura del sistema nervioso del hombre y los vertebrados,” in Spanish) and subsequently translated into French in 1911 (“Histologie du systeme nerveux”). As the decades have passed, one by one all his theories have been corroborated using modern techniques, and the main hypotheses that Cajal postulated have become universally recognized as biological laws: The neuron theory; the law of the dynamic polarization of the neuron and the principle of connectional specificity.