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Fridtjof Nansen: Nordic Polymath
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18609 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
2,546 Words |
| Author
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John S. Edwards
John S. Edwards is professor of zoology at the University of
Washington, Seattle. He does research in neurobiology and has
a long-standing interest in the literature of exploration. |
Our memory is a selective device; we all sense that the story we construct of our own lives is simplified. It should not be too surprising then that the complex paths of history also simplify in hindsight. Social movements with all their turmoil quickly resolve into a series of names and dates in history books. The names we remember can depend more on personality than priority; the squeaking wheel is oiled, the noisy and the dramatic leave behind them an impact that becomes part of myth. History books in turn perpetuate the myth. So it is with scientific discovery.
Isaac Newton, one of the greatest of all scientific innovators, recognized that he "merely stood on the shoulders of those who came before him." The shoulders he spoke of, however, are not only those of predecessors; sometimes they include those of people who have traveled the scientific path concurrently but whose contributions are lost in the winnowing processes of history.
Science, like society, has its roots, and we are better able to understand our culture if we keep an eye on those roots. Appreciating both the continuity of science, in a pattern of leaps and plateaus rather like evolution, and the complex interplay of ideas and personalities gives a richer sense of the process than the simple, linear who did what and when story that often passes for the history of science.
A case in point is the search for an understanding of the structure of the nervous system in the late nineteenth century. What came to be known as the neuron doctrine, a fundamental concept that now underlies our understanding of the brain, states that the nervous system is composed of a multitude of cells, just as the liver, for example, or the pancreas. The specialized cellular units of the nervous system, now called neurons, form communication networks; they are in contact with one another but do not fuse to form a continuous network, or reticulum.
Neuroscience Pioneers
We are now a hundred years on from the creation of that chapter in the history of science. That debate, which rumbled into the early decades of the twentieth century, and the facts that revealed themselves so reluctantly have been whittled down with the passage of time to the work of one man, a colorful personality, prodigiously industrious worker, and tireless promoter of his own efforts: Santiago Ramon y Cajal. Cajal is known to all initiates of the science of the nervous system as "the father of the neuron doctrine," and thus as a
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