The Passive Isopotential Cell

Modern neuroscience can be traced back to the work of Camillo Golgi, an Italian physician and scientist who invented, in the late 1890's, a method for staining neural tissue. As the Golgi stain only “took” to a small and well separated population of cells it permitted, for the first time, one to see the trees for the forest. The Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal took quick advantage of the Golgi method to systematically describe the different types of neurons contained in the brain of many animal species. By demonstrating that neurons, though widely varying in shape, nonetheless share common structural components, from which function may be inferred, Ramon y Cajal can be said to have founded modern neuroscience. This chapter introduces and motivates the basic electrical properties of neurons and ionic channels, including membrane conductance, capacitance, Nernst potential and synaptic conductance.