{"id":11967,"date":"2019-06-19T14:44:54","date_gmt":"2019-06-19T18:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/?p=11967"},"modified":"2019-06-19T14:58:36","modified_gmt":"2019-06-19T18:58:36","slug":"from-science-to-fiction-a-very-active-emeritus-professors-next-chapter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/2019\/from-science-to-fiction-a-very-active-emeritus-professors-next-chapter\/","title":{"rendered":"From Science to Fiction\u2014A Very Active Emeritus Professor\u2019s Next Chapter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Returning from a recent trip to his native Spain, 89-year-old Emeritus Professor Miguel Marin-Padilla made a surprising decision\u2014after nearly 60 years in academic medicine and more than 190 scientific publications, it was time to leave science behind. \u201cIt is time for me to close that door and let young people move the field forward,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Miguel Marin-Padilla in his Remsen office in before he retired in 2001. (photo by Pier Bastianeli).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Marin-Padilla was invited to his alma mater in Granada to accept an honor membership in the Spanish Society of Anatomical Pathology and the International Academy of Pathology\u2014in recognition of his career and body of work dedicated to the field of pathology. While there, he also visited the Institute of Neurosciences of Castilla y Le\u00f3n in Salamanca where he met with enthusiastic graduate students and gave a talk on the repair of perinatal brain damage in the pathogenesis of epilepsy.<\/p>\n

An emeritus professor of pathology and of pediatrics, Marin-Padilla has had a long and fulfilling career. For more than 40 years, he taught general pathology to Dartmouth medical students, and developmental pathology to pediatricians and neonatologists at Dartmouth-Hitchcock.<\/p>\n

In the late 1970s he became interested in studying the brain and has since devoted his life to that pursuit. His research garnered the Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award\u2014given by the National Institutes of Health\u2019s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to investigators of \u201cexceptional talent, imagination, and preeminent scientific achievement.\u201d<\/p>\n

And his retirement, 18 years ago, did little to stop his quest to understand the brain<\/a>. Marin-Padilla has spent nearly all of those years conducting research in his \"Sancta Sanctorum,\" which houses his collection of more than 5,000 pristine rapid Golgi preparations (a method of staining nerve tissue allowing neurons to be seen with great clarity), an old microscope, and books with drawings by Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal.<\/p>\n

Ram\u00f3n y Cajal, a Spanish neuroscientist and pathologist, who in the late 1880s improved Camillo Golgi\u2019s staining method to study neurons, found that the brain\u2019s nervous system is made up of individual cells touching one another, rather than a network\u2014proving for the first time that neurons behave as biochemically distinct cells\u2014a discovery that became the basis of modern neuroscience. Both Golgi and Ram\u00f3n y Cajal made beautiful drawings of brain cells they saw in microscopic bits of brain tissue.<\/p>\n

\"\"
This example of a camera lucida drawing created by Marin-Padilla from a series of Golgi preparations shows the neuronal composition of the motor cortex of an infant.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Captivated by Ram\u00f3n y Cajal\u2019s work, Marin-Padilla has used the same centuries-old methods for more than 50 years\u2014cutting brain tissue into tiny sections by hand with a razor blade, staining and preparing them for study, which requires painstaking patience and dedication\u2014to map the activity of neurons in the human brain. Setting him apart from other neuroscientists, he too made artistic and elegant drawings illustrating what he saw through the microscope.<\/p>\n

But few 21st<\/sup> century neuroscientists are using Golgi\u2019s method. They use modern techniques, such as computer modeling and crowd sourcing to answer fundamental questions about the brain.<\/p>\n

His dedication to the 19th<\/sup> century technique has led to many important discoveries: he was one of the first to describe pioneer neurons that are critical in setting up the pathways by which all other neurons in the brain migrate to their proper place; he dispelled a common belief that neurons extend their branches up to the superficial layers of the cortex\u2014they elongate from the top of the brain downward; was the first to link structural abnormalities in the brain\u2014that abnormally shaped neurons correlated with cognitive difficulties in children with Down syndrome and those who developed epilepsy as a result of perinatal brain damage; he provided detailed descriptions of how blood vessels grow into the brain as it develops; and contributed to understanding the fundamental principles that govern the embryonic origins of the mammalian cerebral cortex.<\/p>\n

On June 3, Marin-Padilla published what he says is his final paper\u2014\u201cEndothelial Cells Filopodia in the Anastomosis of Central Nervous System Capillaries\u201d<\/a> in Frontiers in Neuroanatomy<\/em>\u2014capping a career of more than 190 publications focusing mostly on the motor cortex, including two books.<\/p>\n

But Marin-Padilla has no intention of pursing a life of leisure. \u201cI cannot stay put, I have to keep going,\u201d says the lifelong walker who still logs two miles each day mulling over new questions and ideas\u2014though his thoughts no longer compel him to return to the Sancta Sanctorum and his brain slides.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know a great deal about the human brain\u2014I\u2019ve spent a lifetime studying it, so I\u2019m going to write novels based on my understanding,\u201d he says smiling. \u201cOne of my ideas takes place in prehistoric times, it\u2019s about what happens to identical twins when one of them suffers a brain injury and develops a new personality.\u201d<\/p>\n

He hasn\u2019t completely left science behind.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Returning from a recent trip to his native Spain, 89-year-old Emeritus Professor Miguel Marin-Padilla made a surprising decision\u2014after nearly 60 years in academic medicine and more than 190 scientific publications, it was time to leave science behind. \u201cIt is time for me to close that door and let young people move the field forward,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":11968,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1,8],"tags":[38,207,282,29],"class_list":["post-11967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-research","tag-faculty","tag-faculty-recognition","tag-miguel-marin-padilla","tag-neuroscience","author-12"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2019\/06\/mmp-4-nc1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-371","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11967"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11974,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11967\/revisions\/11974"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}