Written by: Kate Giffin
Edited by: Elise Tahti
The first neuroscientists were artists. Using clever chemistry, they developed ways to stain brain tissue and then drew what they saw. Here, I have carved a block print based on one of the first published drawings of microglia, the immune cells of the brain. In a series of four 1919 papers, Pío del Río-Hortega described these cells and clearly showed that they were a different cell type from the other glial cells in the brain, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. His conclusions about microglia, based almost solely on observations about how they look under different conditions, were startlingly accurate. For example, he noticed that microglia rapidly migrate to a site of injury and transform in shape, even becoming, in his words, “monstrous.” He accurately hypothesized that they clean up debris through a process called phagocytosis. He also speculated that microglia have a different developmental origin than other brain cell types, a conclusion that wouldn’t be verified for over 100 years and which required the development of sophisticated genetic fate mapping techniques.
Continue reading “Branching Through Time: The Art & Science of Microglia”
