Rafael Lorente de Nó (1902-1990), Cajal's youngest pupil and the closed circuits American psychology built on
Cajal's youngest direct disciple, in Madrid at eighteen, in the United States from 1931 and at the Rockefeller Institute from 1936 to 1970. He named the cortical elementary unit in 1933, two decades before electrodes could test it, and described self-reexciting closed chains of neurons that gave Donald Hebb the mechanism for the cell assembly. He was nominated for the Nobel four times and never won, and he refused to the end to accept the ionic theory of the nerve impulse.
Why this wins its question: Lorente de Nó is usually met twice and never introduced: as a citation in the prehistory of cortical columns and as a name in Hebb's index. This object puts the two together with the dates that make them arguable - the elementary unit in 1933 rather than 1949, the closed chain stated with its refractory-period condition, Hebb's own February 1944 sentence quoted in full - and then prints what a hagiography would leave out: that Hebb's textbook editions never cited him, that the "column" he is credited with is a contested notion in the literature named by his own advocate, that four Nobel nominations produced nothing, and that he rejected the ionic theory of the nerve impulse and was wrong. Every one of those is bound to a peer-reviewed paper.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Rafael Lorente de Nó was born at Zaragoza on 8 April 1902 and died at Tucson, Arizona, on 2 April 1990. He was first guided by Pedro Ramón y Cajal, professor of histology at Zaragoza, from whom he learned routine histology and the silver impregnations; he was accepted into Santiago Ramón y Cajal's Madrid laboratory in 1920 at eighteen and took his medical degree at twenty-one. He was the youngest of Cajal's direct disciples.
He sailed to America in 1931 and became head of the Neuroanatomical Laboratory at the Central Institute for the Deaf in St Louis, Missouri. In 1935 he was appointed lecturer at Washington University, and in 1936 he moved to the Rockefeller Institute, where he stayed until his formal retirement in 1970. He had worked with Robert Bárány in Sweden before the move. In 1981 he went to Tucson, where he died.
The term cortical "module", or "elementary unit", was coined by Lorente de Nó for a vertical neural quantum having distinct extrinsic afferences and interneurons converging onto a single pyramidal cell or a group of them. The date matters and is the point his commentator presses: it has been assumed that the idea appeared first in the well-known chapter of 1949, but he had already anticipated the existence of physiologically distinct elemental units in 1933, nearly twenty years before intracellular recording existed to test them.
In the same 1933 work he described a circuit that closes on itself. The pyramids with recurrent axis cylinder and the deep pyramids on one side, and the superficial pyramids on the other, constitute a closed chain of neurons, so that impulses may travel around it provided the refractory period of each cell is somewhat shorter than the time an impulse needs to travel through the chain; the discharge of such closed chains would constitute the autogenous activity of the cortex, at a frequency set by the number of active links.
He also predicted how a central synapse would have to work: subliminal changes summate first in the dendrites and then around the axon, and the central synapse cannot be compared with the neuromuscular junction. Later work found the columnar organisation he had drawn - Mountcastle and Powell in somatosensory cortex and Hubel and Wiesel in visual cortex, both in 1959 - and voltage-sensitive optical imaging has since shown foci corresponding to supragranular and infragranular pyramids.
The idea reached American psychology through Donald Hebb, and the transfer is documented in Hebb's own words. Hebb recalled that "it was in February 1944 that I came back to the problem of thought and the brain, when I found out that Rafael Lorente de Nó had recently shown: (1) that reentrant or closed circuits were to be found throughout the brain, which thus was no longer to be seen as a through-transmission, sensorimotor mechanism, but as one capable of a purely internal activity also, as a possible basis of thought". Hebb had come to the work through Hilgard and Marquis's Conditioning and Learning of 1940.
What the closed circuit solved for Hebb was how a stimulus could be retained in the brain's circuitry after the stimulus had stopped, which is the mechanism the cell assembly needed. The Organization of Behavior (1949) referenced four papers by Lorente de Nó, of 1938, 1938, 1939 and 1943.
The transmission was also partly anonymous, and this is the counterpoint to any claim of influence. Brown records that although The Organization of Behavior referenced four papers by Lorente de Nó, none of the four editions of Hebb's textbook included references to any of Lorente de Nó's papers, the figures being credited to secondary sources instead. A student of Hebb's textbook could absorb the reverberatory circuit without ever learning whose it was.
The priority is real but the concept it anticipates is contested, and the source that argues for him says so. The cortical "column" is often a context-defined notion rather than a well-defined concept, and the commentator names the literature in which that is disputed - Valverde, Mountcastle, Horton and Adams, Rockland, Merchant and colleagues. Crediting Lorente de Nó with the column therefore credits him with a term whose meaning has never been fully settled.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize four times and never received it - "almost immediately nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1949 and 1950 by American institutions", and his last nominations in 1952 and 1953, both from European institutions. He was a member of the American Physiological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The reason offered for the isolation is his own scientific position, not neglect by others. The account used here states that the international scientific community, and especially the Anglo-Saxons, rallied against Lorente's refusal to accept the chemical basis of synaptic transmission and, more flagrantly still, his rejection of the ionic nature of nerve impulses - that is, against Hodgkin and Huxley. On the central question of how a nerve impulse works he was wrong, and he stayed wrong in public.
His emigration was one strand of a dispersal, and the source that praises the school also prints its cost: the Civil War of 1936 to 1939 sent Lafora and Río-Hortega and most of Río-Hortega's direct disciples into exile, Villaverde was assassinated in revolutionary Madrid, Tello and de Castro were demoted for their liberal ideas and allowed to keep working only under serious limitations, and the journal Archivos de Neurobiología, founded in 1920 by Lafora, Ortega y Gasset and Sacristán, was closed by the authorities in power at the end of the war in 1939. The same account names a quieter cause of obscurity as well: the school published in Spanish.