X-Message-Number: 7889
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 08:56:26 -0800 (PST)
From: Joseph Strout <>
Subject: Re: seeing synapses

John wrote:

> That must be a problem of contrast not resolution. Camillo Golgi
> discovered the Synapse by staining nerve cells with silver salts, he got
> the Nobel Prize for it in 1906. He certainly didn't have an electron
> microscope or even a confocal. 

...and he didn't do it by seeing the synapses, either!  There was a big
argument at the time about whether the nervous system is composed of
individual cells, or whether it is one giant multi-nucleated cell (like a
muscle fiber).  The weight of opinion was leaning towards the one giant
cell idea.  Golgi stumbled onto a staining technique that filled a few
cells here and there; not very many, but when it did fill one, it filled
it completely.  Thus it became pretty obvious that the nervous system was
composed of cells, and these cells must be joined by joining points (i.e.
synapses).

So he proved that synapses existed, by proving that the nervous system
isn't one giant cell.  But he never saw them.  It takes EM to do that.
(At least, usually; there are a few giant synapses here and there, e.g.
the neuromuscular junction, or in certain invertibrates.  But if we're
talking typical human central synapses: way too small for light
microscopy.)

,------------------------------------------------------------------.
|    Joseph J. Strout           Department of Neuroscience, UCSD   |
|               http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/  |
`------------------------------------------------------------------'


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