Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to A Dröscher.
The year 1998 is the centenary of the Golgi apparatus. It is an occasion to pay tribute to Camillo Golgi and the other pioneers of Golgi apparatus research. From the very beginning, the discussion of the Golgi apparatus was characterized by a great variety of theories and innovative terminology, with signs of keen interest already evident during the era of light microscopy.
We celebrate in 1998 the centenary of the discovery of the Golgi apparatus. Neurones have played a special role in the history of this cell organelle, primarily because the endocellular apparatus was discovered in nerve cells by Camillo Golgi when he was studying the cerebellum of an owl. In the following years, the apparatus of the nerve cell represented the prototype of this cell component which, however, was soon also detected in many other cell types. During the 1920s and 1930s the original idea of a Golgi endocellular "network" was refused and research was focused on the constituents and function of the organelle, using various tissues and techniques. However, the real existence of the apparatus was seriously questioned until the organelle was finally identified by electron microscopy in the mid-1950s. The studies performed on nerve cells during these decades is briefly reviewed here.
1998 is the year of the centenary of the discovery of the Golgi apparatus. This event is considered in its historical context: the first cell theory of 1838-1839, the first polemics in cytology and the research on the cell organelles at the turn of the century. The first approaches to clarify the physiological significance of the apparatus is traced from Golgi (1909) to Bowen (1929).
Camillo Golgi (1843-1926) was born at Corteno, near Brescia, in northern Italy. After graduating in Medicine at the ancient University of Pavia, the former seat of great scientists and naturalists, Golgi continued a long-standing Italian tradition by studying the histology of the nervous system. While working as a modest physician at Abbiategrasso, a small town near Pavia, he developed a silver-osmium technique, the "reazione nera" (black reaction), for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906. In the late 1890's, 25 years after the publication of his black reaction and while Professor of General Pathology in Pavia, Golgi noticed a fine internal network in only partially silver-osmium-blackened Purkinje cells. Following confirmation by his assistant Emilio Veratti, Golgi published the discovery, called the "apparato reticolare interno", in the Bollettino della Società medico-chirurgica di Pavia in 1898, which is now considered the birthday of the "Golgi apparatus". The discovery of the Golgi apparatus can be added to the long list of accidental discoveries. The man after whom it is named was not a cytologist engaged in studying the inner structure of the cell, but a pathologist searching to prove a neuroanatomical theory.