In 1906, Cajal and Golgi were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for their elucidation of the structure of the nervous system. It might have been the oddest prize in its history because it was an armistice more than an award: Cajal’s and Golgi’s ideas about the structure of the nervous system were precisely opposed to each other. In time, with the invention of more powerful microscopes, Cajal’s theory—of discrete neurons communicating with each other, and the impulse moving from cell to cell in a directional course—would be proved right. The nervous system was made of wires and circuits, but the
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