Camillo Golgi (1843-1926): Italian neuroscientist and Nobel laureate.

T he Golgi apparatus, that part of the cell organelle responsible for processing macromolecules, is named after Camillo Golgi, a remarkable Italian scientist who became in 1906, history's sixth Nobel laureate in medicine. Born in Corteno, a small mountain village in Italy's Lombardy area on July 7, 1843, Bartolomeo Camillo Golgi had his early education in nearby Pavia. Italy, then under Austrian rule, was experiencing a period of political turmoil. Young Golgi was reportedly arrested for expressing discontent with its rulers, and suspended from school for derisive comments about the German language. Still, he managed to graduate from the medical school at the University of Pavia in 1865 at the age of 22 years. Two mentors would shape Golgi's eventual growth into one of Europe's most prominent scientists.They were Cesare Lombroso, a prominent psychiatrist, who inspired Golgi to study the brain, and Giulio Bizzozero, the discoverer of the platelet, whose niece he married and from whom he learnt the art and science of histological investigation. THE BLACK REACTION In 1872, Golgi became chief physician at the Pio Luogo degli Incurabili, a hospital for chronic diseases at Abbiategrasso near Milan. Reputed to be a skilled physician, Golgi declined private consultations, preferring instead to set up a laboratory in the kitchen of his small apartment. There, he used histological techniques as " the direct means of penetrating the formidable unknown of the architecture of the nervous system. " His moment came in 1873. On February 16th, he wrote to his friend Nicolo Manfredi: " I spend long hours at the microscope. I am delighted that I have found a new reaction to demonstrate even to the blind, the structure of the interstitial stroma of the cerebral cortex. I let the silver nitrate react with pieces of brain hardened in potassium dichromate. I have obtained magnificent results and hope to do even better in future. " He was referring to the black reaction, known as " Golgi staining " or " Golgi impregnation, " which was capable of highlighting the morphological complexities of nerve tissue. Using this breakthrough technique, he characterised the histological structure of the neuron, and demonstrated the repeated branching of nerve axons. He also identified dendrites as projections of neurons, which remained free and separate and did not fuse into a network. With various staining methods and the expert use of the microscope, Golgi performed studies on the olfactory bulbs, …