Vittorio Erspamer
| Vittorio Erspamer | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
30 July 1909 Malosco, Italy |
| Died | 25 October 1999 (aged 90) Rome, Italy |
| Known for | Discoverer of serotonin and octopamine |
Vittorio Erspamer (30 July 1909 – 25 October 1999) was an Italian pharmacologist and chemist, known for the identification, synthesis and pharmacological studies of more than sixty new chemical compounds, most notably serotonin and octopamine.
Erspamer was born in 1909 in the small village of Val di Non in Malosco, a municipality of Trentino in northern Italy. He attended school in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Trento and then moved to Pavia, where he studied at Ghislieri College, graduating in medicine and surgery in 1935. He then took the post of assistant professor in anatomy and physiology at the University of Pavia – one of the oldest universities in Europe, founded in 1361. In 1936, he obtained a scholarship to study at the Institute of Pharmacology at the University of Berlin. After returning to Italy in 1939, he moved to Rome where he took up the position of professor in pharmacology. In Rome, the focus of his research shifted to drugs and he used his past biological experience to focus on compounds isolated from animal tissues. In 1947 he became professor of pharmacology at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Bari. In 1955, he moved from Bari to Parma, to assume an equivalent position of professor of pharmacology at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Parma. Erspamer was one of the first Italian pharmacologists to realize that fruitful scientific research benefits from building a relationship with the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. In the late 1950s, he established a collaboration with chemists at the Farmitalia company. The collaboration was useful, not only for the analysis of the structure of new molecules which he isolated and characterized pharmacologically, but also for the subsequent industrial synthesis of these chemicals and their synthetic analogs.
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