The challenge of the IX Symposium has already been taken up by many scientists through their participation and knowing that they would have to measure themselves with other researchers on completely different sectors.
It has been a wonderful experience because they all have talked with each other and it has been a victory of the true research, the one that “does research” to find the most diverse, effective solutions in order to solve the same problem.
Therefore, I can only thank all the speakers, many of whom have been friends for decades and we took the first steps with in unsuspecting times, on an uneven surface walked on by few, full of certainties and a lot more.
We cannot fail to recall, at this stage, what Nobel Prize Rita Levi Montalcini, our honorary President for about 20 years, repeated over and over about the need for all the barriers keeping the brain isolated from the other parts of the body and from the other researchers on the human body and its diseases to collapse.
Because the brain governs everything and interacts with everything, giving impulses, receiving information and modulating with them, repairing and “shaping itself” to be able to take care of shortcomings that are neither foreseen nor predictable. The S.N.C. is now capable of doing this and today at last it can be shown that when one of its parts dies its function gets replaced by other structures, grey and white, designed to perform other tasks but which, if needed, can do something different as long as they keep that wonderful anatomo-functional unit that is the human body “in harmony”.
In this issue of Raggi di Luce, released with a few months’ delay due to obvious reasons, we shall publish notes and news related to the Symposium including some abstracts worthy of mention, like the one of the research that won the “Remembering Rita” Award by Dr. Marco Cocchi, receipient of scholarship in our foundation. Congratulations to him for his research on melatonin for the treatment of injuries to the spinal cord.
The most sincere admiration goes to Dr. Cocchi, already graduated in Medical Biotechnologies, for choosing to enrol in the faculty of Medicine and Surgery, thus combining the fulfilment of his dream to become a doctor with the concept of translational medicine “from the bench to the bedside”. Best of luck Marco, may the desire to discover new ways to get to the comprehension and the cure of the many diseases still affecting human beings today never leave you..