Don Pío del Río Hortega y Vara López

Pío del Río Hortega and the discovery of the oligodendrocytes

Pío del Río Hortega (1882-1945) discovered microglia and oligodendrocytes (OLGs), and after Ramón y Cajal, was the most prominent figure of the Spanish school of neurology. He began his scientific career with Nicolás Achúcarro from whom he learned the use of metallic impregnation techniques suitable to study non-neuronal cells. Later on, he joined Cajal's laboratory. and Subsequently, he create...

Corrigendum: Pío del Río-Hortega: A Visionary in the Pathology of Central Nervous System Tumors

[This corrects the article on p. 13 in vol. 10, PMID: 26973470.].

Pío del Río Ortega: A Pioneer in the Pathology of Central Nervous System Tumors

The last 140 years have seen considerable advances in knowledge of central nervous system tumors. However, the main tumor types had already been described during the early years of the twentieth century. The studies of Dr. Pío del Río Hortega have been ones of the most exhaustive histology and cytology-based studies of nervous system tumors. Río Hortega's work was performed using silver stainin...

El Don Del Águila

From the Cajal alumni Achúcarro and Río-Hortega to the rediscovery of never-resting microglia

Under the guidance of Ramón y Cajal, a plethora of students flourished and began to apply his silver impregnation methods to study brain cells other than neurons: the neuroglia. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Nicolás Achúcarro was one of the first researchers to visualize the brain cells with phagocytic capacity that we know today as microglia. Later, his pupil Pío del Río-Horte...