Reglas y consejos sobre investigación científica. Los tónicos de la voluntad. by Santiago Ramón y Cajal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Books, like people, we respect and admire for their good qualities, but we only love them for some of their defects.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal has a fair claim to being the greatest scientist to hail from Spain. I have heard him called the “Darwin of Neuroscience”: his research and discoveries are foundational to our knowledge of the brain. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1906 it was for his work using nerve stains to differentiate neurons. At the time, you see, the existence of nerve cells was still highly controversial; Camillo Golgi, with whom Ramón y Cajal shared the Nobel, was a supporter of the reticular theory, which held that the nervous system was one continuous object.
Aside from being an excellent scientist, Ramón y Cajal was also a man of letters and a passionate teacher. These three aptitudes combined to produce this charming book. Its prosaic title is normally translated into English—inaccurately but more appealingly—as Advice to a Young Investigator. These originated as lectures delivered in the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales in 1897 and published the next year by his colleague. They consist of warm and frank advice to students embarking on a scientific career.
Ramón y Cajal is wonderfully optimistic when it comes to the scientific enterprise. Like the philosopher Susan Haack, he thinks that science follows no special logic or method, but is only based on sharpened common sense. Thus one need not be a genius to make a valuable contribution. Indeed, for him, intelligence is much overrated. Focus, dedication, and perseverance are what really separate the successes from the failures. He goes on to diagnose several infirmities of the will that prevent young and promising students from accomplishing anything in the scientific field. Among these are megalófilos, a type exemplified in the character Casaubon in Middlemarch, who cannot finish taking notes and doing research in time to actually write his book.
While much of Ramón y Cajal’s advice is timeless, this book is also very much of a time and a place. He advises his young students to buy their own equipment and to work at home—something that would be impractical today, not least because the equipment used in laboratories today has grown so much in complexity and expense. He even advises his student on finding the right wife (over-cultured women are to be avoided). More seriously, these lectures are marked by the crisis of 1898, when Spain lost the Spanish-American war and the feeling of cultural degeneration was widespread. Ramón y Cajal is painfully aware that Spain lagged behind the other Western countries in scientific research, and much of these lectures is aimed alleviating at specifically Spanish shortcomings.
In every one of these pages Ramón y Cajal’s fierce dedication to the scientific enterprise, his conviction that science is noble, useful, and necessary, and his desire to see the spirit of inquiry spread far and wide, are expressed with pungent wit that cannot fail to infect the reader with the same zeal to expand the bounds of human knowledge and with an admiration for such an exemplary scientist.
Lotz in Translation 
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