Rodríguez Delgado was born in Ronda, in the province of Málaga, Spain in 1915. He received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Madrid just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. During the Spanish Civil War he joined the Republican side and served as a medical corpsman while he was a medical student. Rodríguez Delgado was held in a concentration camp for five months after the war ended. After serving in the camp, he had to repeat his M.D. degree, and then gained a Ph.D. at the Ramón y Cajal Institute in Madrid.
Rodríguez Delgado's father was an eye doctor and he had planned to follow in his footsteps. However, once he discovered the writings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Nobel laureate in 1906, and after having spent somRodríguez Delgado was born in Ronda, in the province of Málaga, Spain in 1915. He received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Madrid just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. During the Spanish Civil War he joined the Republican side and served as a medical corpsman while he was a medical student. Rodríguez Delgado was held in a concentration camp for five months after the war ended. After serving in the camp, he had to repeat his M.D. degree, and then gained a Ph.D. at the Ramón y Cajal Institute in Madrid.
Rodríguez Delgado's father was an eye doctor and he had planned to follow in his footsteps. However, once he discovered the writings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Nobel laureate in 1906, and after having spent some time in a physiology laboratory, Delgado no longer wanted to be an eye doctor. Delgado became captivated by "the many mysteries of the brain. How little was known then. How little is known now!”
In 1946 Rodríguez Delgado won a fellowship at Yale University in the department of physiology under the direction of John F. Fulton. In 1950, Rodríguez Delgado accepted a position in the physiology department which at the time was headed by John Fulton. By 1952, he had co-authored his first paper on implanting electrodes into humans.
The Spanish minister of Education, Villar Palasí, asked Rodríguez Delgado to help organize a new medical school at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Rodríguez Delgado accepted Palasí's proposal and relocated to Spain with his wife and two children in 1974.
Rodríguez Delgado had last moved with his wife, Caroline, to San Diego, California before his death on September 15, 2011....more