As you can probably tell, my username with spaces would be 'team ramon y cajal'. I'm a neuroscientist-in-training (getting my bachelor's degree in two weeks!), and I'd like to introduce you to the first grand debate of modern neuroscience.

First of all, the link goes to Camillo Golgi's Nobel Lecture, in which he persists with his now-discredited theory about the nervous system. Santiago Ramon y Cajal and Camillo Golgi shared the Nobel Prize in 1906 for their work on discovering the cellular structure of the nervous system.

This belies, though, a protracted debate about its very nature.

Here are a series of links which tell you in more depth about all this; I'm not going to rehash it too much, but I'll give you the gist of it.

http://namnezia.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/neuronistas-vs-reticularistas/

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/07/03/the-discovery-of-the-neuron/

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1906/article.html

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camillo_Golgi

Camillo Golgi, an Italian physician best known for his invention of Golgi staining and whose name designates several kinds of receptors in the human body, had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine every year since 1901. In 1906, a new name came on the scene: Santiago Ramon y Cajal, a Spanish pathologist.

The heart of the feud was the composition of the nervous system. Was the nervous system composed of discrete cells, or was it a single, continuous tissue?

Santiago Ramon y Cajal was a proponent of the former. He used Golgi staining to visualize the cells in sections of nervous tissue and made detailed drawings of these. His examinations led to the neuron doctrine, the fundamental theory on which neuroscience today is based. Scholarpedia words it thus:

1. The neuron is the structural and functional unit of the nervous system.

2. Neurons are individual cells, which are not anatomically continuous to other neurons.

3. The neuron has three parts: dendrites, soma (cell body) and axon. The axon has several terminal arborizations, which make close contact to dendrites or the soma of other neurons.

With its physiological corollary:

4. Conduction of nerve impulses is directional and follows the theory of axipetal polarization. According to Cajal, the polarization of the nerve impulse is due to the pre-established relations between the neurons and the initial position of the excitation; if the point of entry of the current varies, the excitation wave can go from the axon to the cell body or from an axonal branch to its main trunk; and the same can apply to dendrites.

Camillo Golgi was a proponent of the latter. His reasoning was that the nervous system transmitted electrical impulses and therefore was composed of an anatomically continuous network composed of axons joined in a net-like structure - hence his use of the term 'reticular theory' ('reticulum' means 'net'). Weirdly enough, his earlier work depicted separate cells in the cerebellum and olfactory bulb, but he maintained his belief in reticular theory until the 1950s when electron microscopy finally put it to rest by confirming the existence of neurons and visualizing synapses.

Their Prize was dubbed the "storm center of histological controversy". Cajal said "What a cruel irony of fate of pair, like Siamese twins united by the shoulders, scientific adversaries of such contrasting character!"