Defence from Invertebrates to Mammals: Focus on Tonic Immobility

Giancarlo Carli began his research career when he was a medical student in Siena in November 1959. This changed his life style for ever. The head of the Institut, Cesare Bartorelli, Professor of Medical Pathology, was a neurophysiologist that had moved to the clinic, but dedicated all his efforts in recruiting excellent investigators and in collecting Italian and foreign grants to develop competitive scientific projects. Indeed, Carli had the opportunity to meet young medical doctors such as Alberto Zanchetti, Alberto Malliani and Emilio Bizzi that greatly influenced his scientific education and his mentality. Zanchetti had received a neurophysiologic training in Pisa where he had published a long series of original papers on the reticular formation of the brain stem and was motivated to pursue his work in this field.After one year of intensive training, Carli started a new project with Zanchetti on REM sleep, a sleep phase that had been recently discovered. The project, in spite of strong initial difficulties, provided new findings and interpretations about the connections between brain stem and hippocampus that were published in Science. When Carli moved to Pisa, to Pompeiano lab, they discovered that presynaptic inhibition was responsible for the block of somatosensory transmission during REM sleep. Thanks to these results on REM sleep, in 2003 Giancarlo Carli received an Award as a pioner on sleep studies by the International Society for Study of Sleep.After two additional years in Pisa, working under the supervision of Giuseppe Moruzzi, on animal hypnosis/tonic immobility, Carli moved to Baltimore where he completed his basic training on somatosensory system. In particular, Vernon B. Montcastle taught him how to record from cutaneous and deep hand receptors in monkeys and Robert LaMotte how to train monkeys to perform a psychophysical task.After two years, Carli went back to Siena University where he started his academic carrier. At the same time, Carli developed his first program on pain and tonic immobility in Pisa, where had maintained his old lab, with Louis Lefebvre, a PhD student from Universitè de Montreal. In the following years the work on pain was encouraged by Paolo Procacci, Professor of Internal Medicine at University of Firenze, John J. Bonica, Professor of Anesthesiology, University of Washington,Seattle, and by Manfred Zimmermann, Professor of Physiology,University of Hidelberg. Carli and Zimmermann had an intense collaboration on many education activities including a class on pain to medical students at Siena.The term “animal hypnosis and the consideration that it did not define the same phenomenon in humans stimulated the interest of Carli to attend some Congresses on human hypnosis. Martin Orne, Professor at Pennsylvania University, and Ernest Hilgard, Professor at Standford University, convinced him to join the courageous army of reserchears engaged in the field.

Francesca Ietta is a researcher at the Department of Life Sciences, University of Siena, Siena, Italy. She has spent several years as research fellow at the Department of Physiology, University of Siena. In November 2000, she started the PhD program in “Cellular Physiology and Neuroimmunophysiology at the Department of Physiology, University of Siena. During her PhD studies, she worked for two years at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mont Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada (2002-2004). She is author or co-author of 33 full-papers in indexed Scientific International Journals, 4 papers in international books, and over 50 abstracts. She gave a great contribution to carried out research projects funded by the Italian Ministry for University and Research, the Tuscany’s Environmental Department and by the European Union. She has several national and international cooperations.