GRASSI Giovanni Battista (Grassi Giovanni Battista)

(1854-1925)
Born March 27, 1854 in Rovellaske. He graduated from the University of Pavia, in 1878 received his doctorate in medicine. During the next five years, he studied zoology at the universities of Heidelberg and Wц?rzburg. In 1883 he returned to Italy, became a professor of comparative anatomy of the University of Catania. In 1895 he moved to the chair of comparative anatomy, University of Rome, where he worked until the end of life. Earlier studies focused Grassi helminths: hookworm, roundworm roundworm, Solitaire and conferva, as well as diseases caused by them. Scientists are also studying the social behavior of termites, damage caused by phylloxera, in 1886 described a new species of arachnids. He studied the life cycle of eels, conger eel metamorphosis of larvae.
Especially significant work Grassi on the way to clarify the spread of malaria, the establishment of its vectors and the study of the development cycle the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum - in the mosquito. For the first time this parasite has been detected in the blood of patients with malaria in 1880, but the full life cycle of the malaria parasite in the body of vertebrates, including humans, described Grassi. In 1898, he showed that the only kind of Anopheles mosquitoes can be carriers of malaria, and in the same year the first experimental human malaria infection carried by the bite of this insect. Study of ecology and taxonomy of mosquitoes made it possible to develop ways to combat them. These activities are successfully carried Grassi and other scientists for many years in Italy and other European countries, making the incidence of malaria have dropped dramatically.

Grassi was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and the Italian scientific community, received an honorary professor of University of Leipzig. Grassi - by Labor to the study of mosquito (Contribuzione allo studio dei parasiti malarici, 1892). Grassi died in Rome on 4 May 1925.