Maria Carmela Lico

Maria Carmela Lico or Licco (1927–1985) spent most of her research life as a physiologist studying the neural mechanisms of pain at the Department of Physiology of the Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto (Brazil). During her childhood in Italy, Lico fell ill with an infectious disease that would later "weaken her immune system" In 1970, Lico made a short visit to Yale University, in the laboratory of professor José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado, where she studied the behavior of primates, applying telemetry techniques to infer physiology-behavior relationships. In 1981, Lico applied for full professorship at Ribeirão Preto, a position she held until she died of cancer in 1985.

Research topics Maria Carmela Lico was interested in behavioral neuroscience since her undergraduate studies. – soon she joined Miguel Rolando Covian in the field of neurophysiology. As most researchers under the guidance of Covian, Lico was interested in a wide variety of topics, and it has been said that her personal library – composed mainly of fiction and art books – attests this observation. During these experiments with anesthetized animals, Lico began to observe that, as the anesthetic plane became more superficial, guinea pigs started to vocalize and move, which she considered objective signs of nociception. Lico observed that these signs were abolished by septal stimulation. Based on those observations, she conceived an experiment in which a noxious stimulus that was applied to the dental pulp did not produce nocifensive behavior when preceded by the electrical stimulation of the septal nuclei. A year before her first findings were presented at the annual congress of the Latin American Association for Physiological Sciences, Reynolds published his paper on the antinociceptive effects of periaqueductal gray electrical stimulation in rats. These findings would pave the discovery of the endogenous analgesic system. However, while most posterior researchers focused on the role of the limbic opioid system in the modulation of pain, Lico studied the role of monoamines in other regions, including the area postrema, the caudate and the medial forebrain bundle. They were unable to identify the analgesic substance; by 1975, when Hughes and Kosterlitz described the potent analgesic effects of endorphins, Lico and Garcia-Leme were convinced that the substance generated by electroacupuncture was an endorphin. At the end of the 1970s, Lico advised Renato Sabbatini and Isaías Pessotti, both of whom would become important behavioral scientists in Brazil.