Remembering Ferruccio Ritossa

"It did not matter if this interpretation was true or false,” he said. “It was a working link between imagination and reality, like love.” This is how I will always remember Ferruccio, as a scientist, an artist, and a poet. -Gabriella Santoro quoting Ferruccio in the article “Ferruccio Ritossa’s scientific legacy 50 years after his discovery of the heat shock response: A new view of biology, a new society, and a new journal”, published in Cell Stress & Chaperones 17(2), 2012.

“It did not matter if this interpretation was true or false. It was a working link between imagination and reality, like love.”
~ Feruccio Ritossa

Brief Biosketch

Ferruccio Ritossa was born in Istria in 1936. After graduating in Agricultural Sciences at the University of Bologna in 1959, he carried out his studies on Genetics in Pavia and then in Naples at IIGB and in the United States. Among his major achievements is the discovery of the Heat Shock response in Drosophila. After teaching Genetics at the Universities of Bari and Bologna, in 1992 he decided to leave the Academy and devote himself to Sculpture.