The forgotten disciples of Ramón y Cajal

Since the opening of the Cajal Year was declared in 2022, Spanish universities, research centers, institutes and civic centers have been filled with neuroscientific activities and workshops around the figure of the brilliant Nobel Prize winner and his disciples.

Much has been written about Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and those who are familiar with his figure have heard, to a lesser or greater extent, of Pío del Río Hortega or Nicolás Achúcarro. But the same may not happen if the names of Manuela Serra or Laura Forster come up.

Let's go back to the beginning of the 1900th century. Ramón y Cajal is in his best research period, despite having quite precarious means. The pressure of Spanish public opinion got the Government of Francisco Silvela to finance the Biological Research Laboratory in XNUMX, the seed of the current Cajal Institute, in Madrid.

It was established as a department of the Alfonso

Laura Forster, an Australian in Madrid
The laboratory's research and Cajal's brilliant career were already known throughout Europe and reached the ears of scientists at the University of Oxford. Among them was the most notable and well-known disciple of the Navarrese scientist: Laura Forster.
Born in Sydney (Australia), Forster studied Medicine at the University of Bern (Switzerland) and moved to England to begin her research career. In 1911 she ended up in Madrid to work in Cajal's laboratory. There she studied the degeneration and regeneration of the spinal cord in birds, and she published an article with her own illustrations clearly influenced by the professor's style.

Unfortunately, her research career was cut short by the first Balkan War (1912-1913), which she went to serve as a nurse in the British Army (as a woman she could not practice medicine). Later, she began a journey as a medic during the First World War, until running a hospital in the Ukrainian city of Zalischyky, where she died in 1917.

Manuela Serra, brilliant researcher and artist
We have to wait until 1919 to find the next woman in the laboratory, Manuela Serra Sabater from Madrid. Of extraordinary intelligence and execution, she was the only disciple recognized by Cajal without university studies.

Despite this, Serra published a solo article in 1921 on glial cells (those that support neurons) in the spinal cord of frogs. Following the tradition of his superiors, it contains detailed drawings of very good quality, although somewhat removed from the Cajal style. He continued working in the laboratory until 1927, when he married.

Forster and Manuela Serra are the only two women who appear on the list of collaborators (a total of twenty-seven) that Cajal compiled at the request of the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1922.

Other pioneers
However, today we know that there were a few more. One of them had a surname that at this point in the article is already familiar to us: Carmen Serra. There is very little data about her time with the Cajal team, but she worked as an assistant research technician during the time of her sister Manuela de ella.

In 1928, María Soledad Ruiz-Capillas joined the laboratory under the direction of Dr. Gonzalo R. Lafora. She was the first woman with a university degree (Medicine from the Central University of Madrid) to be part of the neurological school.

We can consider Ruiz-Capillas as the most versatile of all the Nobel students. After finishing university, she managed three spas (at the time, seen as healing centers rather than places of leisure and relaxation) and during her time with Lafora she studied Dentistry.

His research was also characterized by being eclectic: in just two years he studied thermal control centers in cats and sleep problems derived from brain injuries or injections of certain compounds such as opioids. There is no evidence that she published any of her articles and her supervisor did not include her as an author in hers either.

Behind these pioneers we find María Luisa Herreros. Also considered her disciple, she did not work with Cajal, as she began researching at the Institute that bears her name in 1943.

And, in addition, the diffuse group of illustrators deserves a mention, without whose work the production of drawings at the Cajal laboratory and institute would not have reached such a high level. 84 works signed by Conchita del Valle have been found, about 70 by a certain Mª G. Amador (it is still being investigated who is behind those initials) and another 141 by “E.RNA”, although it is not certain that it is a women.

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Source: The Conversation. Authorship:

Laura De las Heras García
Predoctoral researcher in Neuropharmacology, University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

Celtia Dominguez Fernandez
PhD student in neurosciences, University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

Cristina Miguelez
Associate Professor of the Department of Pharmacology. University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

Jone Razquin
Predoctoral researcher in neuropharmacology, University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea