Ⅱ - IN MEMORIAM GIORGIO ISRAEL (1945-2015)

摘要

Giorgio Israel was born in Rome on 6 March 1945, " a son of the liberation of the city from Nazi occupation in June 1944 ". His father, Saul Israel (1897-1981), born in Salonica (still part of the Ottoman Empire at the time), had studied medicine in Rome starting in 1916 and had embraced a university career in the same city ; at the university he met Giorgio's mother, Anita Contini, a chemistry graduate, whose family hailed from Ancona. She had worked as an assistant to Nicola Parravano (1883-1938) and had been employed in the food industry after World War I. Between the two world wars Saul Israel collaborated with Giulio Fano (1856-1930) at the General Physiology Institute of" La Sapienza" University of Rome, was secretary of the Italian Society of Experimental Biology and one of the organizers of the International Biology Congress held in Rome in 1924. He maintained scientific relations with Louis Lapicque (1866-1952) in particular, in Paris, where his family had moved after the Jewish quarter of their home city was burnt down. As luck would have it, Fano was succeeded as director of the Institute by Sabato Visco, a leading member of the group of Italian scientists actively engaged in racial studies2, and the friction between him and Visco -during the years in which Mussolini's fascist regime was being consolidated in Italy - obliged him to resign in 1936. The harm suffered by his scientific career was further aggravated by the passing of the Italian race laws in 1938 and by the entry of German troops in Rome in 1943, after which he was forced to go into hiding until the Liberation.