15 Facts About Giuseppe Moruzzi

Giuseppe Moruzzi was an Italian neurophysiologist.

Giuseppe Moruzzi was one of three scientists who connected wakefulness to a series of brain structures known as the reticular activating system, and his work reframed sleep as an active process in the brain rather than a passive one.

Giuseppe Moruzzi received the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society and the Feltrinelli Prize from the Accademia dei Lincei.

Giuseppe Moruzzi came from a line of physicians; his father was a general practitioner, his great-grandfather was a pathology professor, and his uncle was a colleague of Jean-Martin Charcot.

Giuseppe Moruzzi studied at the University of Parma under neuroanatomist Antonio Pensa, who had been trained by Camillo Golgi.

Pensa left to work in Pavia, but Giuseppe Moruzzi stayed behind, in part because he could not afford to move away from home but because his interests had shifted from neuroanatomy to neurophysiology.

Giuseppe Moruzzi then worked at the Neurophysiological Institute of Cambridge under Edgar Adrian, where the pair became known for recording discharges from single motor neurons in the pyramidal tracts.

Giuseppe Moruzzi came to Northwestern University to work with a brain scientist named Steven Ranson.

Once at Northwestern, Moruzzi met Horace Winchell Magoun and Donald B Lindsley, and they worked to elucidate the neural processes responsible for wakefulness.

Giuseppe Moruzzi was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1975; he retired in 1980 and died in 1986.

Giuseppe Moruzzi was survived by his wife, Maria Vittoria Venturini, and two sons.

Giuseppe Moruzzi influenced scientists like Giacomo Rizzolatti, Arnaldo Arduini, Lamberto Maffei and Piergiorgio Strata.

In 1965, Giuseppe Moruzzi won the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society, of which he was a member.

Giuseppe Moruzzi was awarded the Feltrinelli Prize from the Accademia dei Lincei, and he received honorary degrees from several universities in the United States and Europe, including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Lyon.

In 1981, Giuseppe Moruzzi became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.