Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) became famous as arctic explorer, politician, humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. What is less known, is that Fridtjof Nansen was the first Norwegian to achieve a Ph.D. in brain research. He was curator at Bergen Museum, where he studied the nervous system in primitive animals. He published his thesis in 1887. He showed that nerve cells did not work as a syncytium, but as single cells within membranes, and with no direct connections between them. He was the first to formulate and give substantial proof for the neuron theory that later gave Santiago Ramon y Cajal and Camillo Golgi the Nobel Prize in 1906. In his thesis Nansen wrote:
