On the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Prizes, every December 10, the Foundation held a first edition of the day dedicated to them and, specifically, a monograph on Ramón y Cajal was held on the occasion of this day.

Three experts in the field, such as José Manuel García Verdugo, Professor Emeritus of Cell Biology at the University of Valencia, Isabel Fariñas, Professor of Cell Biology at the UV and National Research Award in 2024, and María Pedraza, PhD in Neuroscience, spoke about the Spanish Nobel Prize.

Thus, García Verdugo proposed to imagine what would have happened if Cajal had known electron microscopy, presenting a series of drawings by the Nobel Prize winner himself, who always “drew what he saw, he did not invent anything”, who left us a series of extraordinary drawings of the human brain, which today electron microscopy has refuted with a technical precision that did not exist in Cajal’s time.

Fariñas spoke of Cajal’s passion and fascination for the brain, where “we have 86,000 million interconnected neurons, each of which receives about 10,000 synapses from other neurons. Pedraza defined Cajal as “the cartographer of the nervous system, the pioneer of modern science, who dared to hypothesize how the brain worked, and there was not a single false interpretation, given how scrupulous and meticulous he was in everything he did.

María Pedraza, Doctor of Neuroscience, spoke about “The Eye of Fañanás”. Ramón y Cajal’s wife, Silveria Fañanás, dedicated herself to photography, with new techniques that she also commercialized, in addition to helping her husband in the laboratory and being the mother of seven children. She is present in all Cajal’s work,” said Pedraza, “as a pioneer of microscopic photography,” and recognizes that her time in Valencia was considered ” the Spanish Athens, because of the landscapes, the beaches, the courtesy and the Valencian wit,” he said in clear reference to those years in which Cajal taught at the Faculty of Medicine in Valencia as professor of anatomy.

At the end of the speeches, the Foundation announced the publication of 12 interviews with the Nobel Laureates who participate each year as jurors of the Rei Jaume I Awards, which are now available on the Foundation’s YouTube page and will soon be available on the web. The 12 Nobel Laureates interviewed were: Frank, Feringa, Haroche, Ciechanover, Szostak, Klaus von Klitzing, Schekman, Sheldon Lee Glashow, MacMillan, Meldal, Roberts and Patapoutian. It was the latter’s video that was broadcast live during the meeting:

If you want to see the recording of the day: