After decades of institutional threats, the Government approved this Tuesday the creation of a national museum dedicated to disseminating the legacy of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1906 after demonstrating that the brain is organized into individual cells: neurons. The Council of Ministers has approved a Royal Decree that establishes the museum’s headquarters in Madrid, but without explaining where exactly it will be. The location remains an enigma, despite the fact that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, assured in October 2022 that there would be “a museum dedicated to the functioning of the brain” that would begin its activity at the end of the Ramón y Cajal Research Year, on May 31, 2025. There is less than a year left.
The museum will “preserve and exhibit” the Cajal Legacy, made up of more than 28,000 pieces that belonged to the Nobel Prize winner, such as his famous drawings of neuronal architecture, slices of brains to analyze under a microscope, handwritten letters and spectacular images taken by the pioneering researcher. of photography in Spain. This legacy, declared Asset of Cultural Interest on April 2, is currently kept in the National Museum of Natural Sciences, in Madrid.
The discussion about the headquarters has generated tensions within the Government. On June 14, Jorge Pueyo, deputy of the Chunta Aragonesista in the Sumar Plurinational Parliamentary Group, declared: “Madrid is a vacuum cleaner of all public buildings, cultural centers and museums. A Spanish-style British Museum. We Aragonese men and women have the right to enjoy our culture and figures equally and, therefore, the Cajal Museum has to be in Uesca.”
Santiago Ramón y Cajal was born in Petilla de Aragón (Navarra) in 1852 and as a child he grew up in Ayerbe (Huesca), where he already exists an interpretation center in the house in which he resided. He studied Medicine in Zaragoza, spent time as a teacher in Valencia and made his great discoveries in 1888 in Barcelona. However, Cajal lived in Madrid for most of his life, until his death in 1934. He arrived in the capital in 1892, after winning the chair of Histology at the Central University, origin of the current Complutense University.
In Madrid it is preserved practically intact the classroom where Cajal taught for three decades, in the so-called old mansion of San Carlos, on Atocha street, one of the headquarters considered by the Ministry of Science. The old Faculty of Medicine of Madrid was located in that monumental building, between 1834 and 1965. The word operating room was born there at the end of the 19th century, to describe an aseptic operating room, separated from the students and their microbes by a glass wall. And the doctor Severo Ochoa also studied in that mansion, so the only two Spaniards who have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine came from this Madrid scientific temple, property of the Ministry of Science and transferred to the Madrid College of Physicians since 1970.
The Cajal Museum, which will also disseminate the work of his disciples, will be the third attached to the Ministry, in addition to the National Museum of Natural Sciences, in Madrid, and the National Museum of Science and Technology, with offices in A Coruña and the Madrid town of Alcobendas. The Royal Decree maintains that, in addition to the headquarters in Madrid, “subsidiary or linked headquarters may be established to the Cajal Museum in other Spanish municipalities.” The future installation will depend on the Ministry through the Higher Scientific Research Council (CSIC).
Cajal’s legacy has suffered historical mistreatment. His Madrid mansion, at number 64 Alfonso A real estate developer divided the mansion into luxury apartments. In that process, hundreds of Cajal’s books and objects ended up on sale at the Rastro for a few euros.
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