Battista Grassi entomologist and the Roman School of Malariology

Grassi's entomological researches go back to his early years of university study, initially being concerned with agriculture pests. After working in Heidelberg, Grassi's interests turned to basic problems of entomology, such as the evolutionary origin of Miriapoda and Insecta, and termite caste determination. His first investigations into medical entomology related to the problem of bird malaria, which he studied only in relation to the hematic parasites. In 1895, Grassi was appointed Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Rome University, and initiated his entomological collaboration with the Roman malariologists, Amico Bignami, Giuseppe Bastianelli and Ettore Marchiafava. At the end of 1898, they announced, at the session of the Accademia dei Lincei on December 4th, that a healthy man in a non-malarial zone had contracted tertian malaria after being bitten by an experimentally infected Anopheles claviger. Following his disappointment at being excluded from the Nobel prize, Grassi devoted his attention to another important insect related to the transmission of parasitic disease, the sand fly, Phlebotomus papatasii. After World War I malaria had flared up with renewed vigour, so that the social importance of the disease convinced Grassi to resume his studies in 1918. The problem he faced in these years was "Anophelism without malaria" which was to be solved a year after his death by his pupil Falleroni, who demonstrated that there are six cryptic species of Anopheles of which only four bite humans and transmit malaria. Battista Grassi died on 4 May 1925, working to the end: he was reading the proofs of his last paper, Lezione sulla malaria.