Nerve Endings
by Richard Rapport, Richard L. Rapport
Category: Science

A true tale of scientific discovery, Nerve Endings chronicles not only the little-known story of one of the nineteenth century's greatest intellectual struggles but also describes the frailty, perseverance, and creativity of human beings. Two doctors, the warm Spaniard Cajal and the cool Italian Golgi, struggled first against scientific barriers and ultimately against each other to discover what brain cells looked like and how they managed to contact one another. Both did their most important research alone in tiny laboratories set up on their kitchen tables, and both made profound discoveries that led to their jointly winning the 1906 Nobel Prize. Yet one of them found his way into the microscopic forest of individual cells, while the other died convinced that the entire nervous system is a network physically connecting every brain cell directly to its neighbors.