History
Dendritic spines were first described at the end of the 19th century by Santiago Ramon y Cajal on cerebella neurons. Ramón y Cajal then proposed that dendritic spines could serve as contacting sites between neurons. This was demonstrated more than 50 years later thanks to the emergence of electron microscopy. Until the development of confocal microscopy on living tissues, it was commonly admitted that spine were formed during embryonic development and then would remain stable after birth. In this paradigm, variations of synaptic weight were considered as sufficient to explain memory processes at the cellular level. But since about a decade, new techniques of confocal microscopy demonstrated that dendritic spines are indeed motile and dynamic structures that undergo a constant turnover, even after birth.
Read more about this topic: Dendritic Spine
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“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)