brain, a breakthrough technique was required to turn the gaze of
neuroscientists down to individual brain cells. Only then could doctors
understand the unfathomable tangle of cells that is the brain.
Microscopy significantly improved with the innovation of the
achromatic lens by Joseph Jackson Lister (1786–1869), but more
significantly, histology (the study of cells) dramatically improved with
modern chemistry and the use of dyes to bring the tissues to life. But nerve
tissue was stubbornly impervious to staining, and controversy fulminated
over how the brain cells contacted and communicated with each other. In
fact, there were experts who believed that the brain was a singular organ
comprised of a single cell that interconnected with itself in a massive
jumble of hair-like fibers—the “reticular theory.” Every attempt at
staining neural tissue was met with a microscopic rat’s nest of nerve
fibers, and it is easy to see how those mid–19th century histological
pioneers were bamboozled by the brain.
William Perkin’s discovery of mauveine in 1856 (described in chapter
8 , Antibiotics), launched the synthetic dye industry, altering clothing
manufacturing and revolutionizing modern chemistry. Soon, German
universities and corporations were dominating world markets—in
pharmacology, chemistry, and manufacturing—and it’s no surprise that is
was often German scientists who were identifying the next histological
staining technique to bring tissues to life under the microscope. One of the
first people to ever see (and know he was seeing) an individual nerve cell
was Otto Deiters (1834–1863), a young German neuroanatomist, who (at
age twenty-six) invented a technique of staining nerve cells and teasing
away the individual cell under extremely high magnification (300x) and
with remarkable dexterity. Deiters exhibited his findings with drawings by
his own hand, as photomicroscopy had not yet been invented, and the
presentation was obvious: the brain and spinal cord were comprised of
individual cells that had serpentine tentacles to facilitate interaction. He
had succeeded in isolating a singular cell, unbelievably, by hand with tiny
needles,^6 but to make sense of the jangle of cells in the brain, a miracle of
science was necessary. Looking at a cross section of brain tissue under the
microscope was like looking at a bowl of spaghetti, and trying to identify a
single nerve cell is tantamount to following a single spaghetti strand in
that bowl. Perhaps Deiters would have deduced the answer, but sadly he
died from a typhoid infection at age twenty-nine, even before his work was