Giuseppe Moruzzi

Giuseppe Moruzzi (July 30, 1910 – March 11, 1986) was an Italian neurophysiologist. He 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. He received the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society and the Feltrinelli Prize from the Accademia dei Lincei.

Early life Born in Campagnola Emilia, Moruzzi grew up in Parma. He 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. History and literature were Moruzzi's favorite subjects when he was growing up, but he chose to study medicine because Italy's economy was struggling at the time and he knew that he would always have job opportunities with a medical degree.

Career Beginning in 1937, Moruzzi studied under Frederic Bremer at the Neurophysiologic Institute at the University of Brussels. He 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. In the years following World War II, many European scientists relocated to the United States. 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.

Until the 1940s, some scientists felt like wakefulness simply required an adequate level of sensory input rather than a specific process inside the brain. In a 1949 experiment with a cat, Moruzzi and Magoun proved that stimulation of a certain brain region (near the intersection of the pons and midbrain) created a state of alertness. This stimulated area of the brain became known as the reticular activating system or reticular formation. In their experiments, Moruzzi and Magoun also transected the cat's reticular formation without disrupting any of the sensory nerves; the cat was rendered comatose. The experiment shifted science's conception of sleep from a passive process to one that was actively controlled by the brain. Moruzzi also influenced scientists like Giacomo Rizzolatti, Arnaldo Arduini, Lamberto Maffei and Piergiorgio Strata. He 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, Moruzzi became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.

In a 1990 speech, Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini said that Moruzzi had been more deserving of the 1986 Nobel Prize that was awarded to her.