How I Became a Biochemist

Abstract

Like many other things in life, a fascination that grew into a passion became the seed of my scientific career. As the son of a medical doctor, fully captivated by his profession, I was caught by the same interest. My father, as a general physician, was supposed to be competent in all diseases, but in the provincial Italy of the mid-forties, in the impoverished postwar years, the diagnostic and therapeutic armamentarium of a doctor was incredibly limited. When he personally bought the first monstrous electrocardiography machine (inclusive of a Faraday cage) and my mother was helping by sticking the pink stripes of the derivatives on cardboard, big progress was made, at least in a small area of diagnostics, but the therapy was still missing. I could perceive every day his feeling of hopeless frustration for losing a large number of patients. It was then that the idea started to develop in my brain (or in my heart) that even one more billion of those fantastic doctors could not generate a better medicine but only more dissatisfaction. I decided that the only way to go was to analyze the origin of diseases, try to understand their mechanisms and use this as a platform to develop new therapies. In becoming a medical doctor I realized that this was not the ideal to carry out progressive science, but at that time and in Italy it was the only one. My enthusiasm in the successful medical curriculum was embittered by the lack around me of scientific research, the field that I mostly wanted to pursue. Padua had a good medical school, but the wind of science had not touched it again for a number of years. Yes, the famous Orto Botanico, the oldest botanical garden in the world, was founded in 1545 in Padua. Not many years later, in 1592, Galileo Galilei obtained the chair of mathematics, a good salary and the great freedom offered by the Republic of Venice. And still everybody at my time was talking of Giovanni Battista Morgagni, the father of modern pathology and of Lazzaro Spallanzani who had demonstrated the falsity of the spontaneous generation theory. Now, in the middle of the 1950’s, the story of the emigration of an excellent scientist, Giuseppe Attardi, was still resonating in the empty Institute of Anatomy and Histology, from where he had gone to the United States. Giuseppe Attardi is still now, professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at California Institute of Technology. Inspired by this ‘myth’ in my first year of medical school, I chose to work, on a volunteer basis, in that very Institute of Anatomy and Histology. I learned histology from books and how to make and stain tissue slices the hard way, all by myself. I realized as well that that was not science. Thus I moved to the Institute of General Pathology, where a new professor, Massimo Aloisi, had just arrived, with the Received 4 October 2003; accepted 4 October 2003 Address correspondence to: Angelo Azzi, Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Buhlstrasse 28, 3012 Bern Switzerland. E-mail: angelo.azzi@mci.unibe.ch IUBMBLife, 55(9): 555–558, September 2003