Grassi, Giovanni Battista (1854–1925)

Giovanni Battista Grassi (Fig. 1) was an Italian physician and zoologist, who became famous by his works especially on malaria transmission. He was apparently the first who described the whole life cycle of Plasmodium falciparum, while the Nobel Prize winner Ross was the first to show that undefined Plasmodium relictum stages from avians are transmitted by a nondetermined mosquito (he wrote: “grey mosquito with dappled wings”). The initial opinion of the Nobel Prize Committee was to share the prize between Ross and Grassi but later favored Ross and awarded him the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in the year 1902. Grassi’s work was not fully understood, since he published his results in Italian language, so that apparently the Committee failed to recognize the full importance and accuracy of his work, which ended by clear definitions of the different Plasmodium species and in the formulation of the rule, which was later called Grassi’s law: “There is no malaria without Anopheles...