fully published, and it would be up to another researcher to unlock the
secrets of nerves.
Camillo Golgi (1843–1926) was born and raised in the Lombardy
village of Corteno, nestled near the Swiss border. Golgi’s father was the
local physician, and he followed in his father’s footsteps when he traveled
south to the University of Pavia in 1860. While his academic record during
his first decade is unremarkable, Golgi did study under early pioneers in
psychology and histology, pricking his interest in the microscopic study of
nerves. One thousand kilometers away, Robert Koch was busily innovating
the use of microscopy in studying bacteria, and like Koch and Robert
Lister, Golgi later performed his most important research in a makeshift
lab in a kitchen.
Golgi left the comfortable confines of Pavia in 1872, where he had
acquired the analytical skills of a serious histopathologist, and made the
short trip to nearby Abbiategrasso, itself on the outskirts of Milan. For the
next three years, Golgi innovated a new way of staining nerve cells,
stubbornly altering the timing and sequence of reagents until one of
science’s great eureka moments occurred. Playing with his concoctions in
a kitchen lab, Golgi entombed a sample of a dog’s brain in a block of
paraffin wax. Earlier, he had “fixed” the tissue with formalin so that it
would not decay, and once the wax had hardened, the thirty-year-old
scientist sliced incredibly thin, almost transparent sections of the animal’s
olfactory bulb. This time, in 1873, Camillo Golgi first exposed the sample
to potassium dichromate (K 2 Cr 2 O 7 ), and then silver nitrate. Mysteriously,
this resulted in the staining of only a few neurons on the slide, which were
ink-black from the silver, while the rest of the field was a saffron yellow.
To this day, it is unknown why only an isolated few neurons pick up the
silver nitrate, but the result was the unveiling of the identity of a single
nerve within its brainy habitat. With repeated stainings of adjacent slices,
the architecture of the sample could be elucidated, and here, Golgi put his
artistic skills to great use.^7
An incredible piece of medical artwork was published by Golgi in 1875,
exhibiting the columnar organization of the nerve cells of the mammalian
olfactory bulb. Picasso or Dali could not have been more inventive than
Golgi when he accurately captured the botanical layout of the nerve bodies
and their dendritic appendages. This “black reaction,” now called “Golgi’s
method,” is still the standard method of staining nerve tissue,^8 and enabled