Giovanni Battista Grassi (1854 - 4 May 1925) was an Italian zoologist, known for work demonstrating that mosquitos carry the malaria parasite Plasmodium in their digestive tract, on the embryological development of honey bees, on parasites, particularly the vine parasite phylloxera, migrations and metamorphosis in eels, and on termites.
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Grassi was born in Rovellasca, in what is now the province of Como.
He graduated in Medicine from the University of Pavia under professors Camillo Golgi and Giulio Bizzozero. After graduation he worked on parasitic worms of medical importance especially the hookworm in the Department of Comparative Anatomy at Sapienza University in Rome.
From 1878 Grassi worked first at Messina in the Oceanographic Station founded by Nicolaus Kleinenberg and Anton Dohrn where he studied Chaetognatha then at Heidelberg with Karl Gegenbaur and Otto Bütschli. While in Heidelberg Grassi married Maria Koenen.
In 1883 he became Professor of Comparative Zoology at the University of Catania, studying cestodes, the life cycle of the European eel (Catania) and the Moray eel (Rome). Also in Catania he began to study entomology and wrote a student text "The Origin and Descent of Myriapods and Insects" in addition to scientific papers. He also began to study malaria working with Raimondo Feletti on malaria, especially bird malaria.
In 1895 Grassi was appointed professor of comparative anatomy at Rome University and joined Angelo Celli, Amico Bignami, Giuseppe Bastianelli and Ettore Marchiafava a group working on malaria in districts around Rome. Grassi was the group’s entomologist. The group announced at the session of the Accademia dei Lincei on December 4th 1889 that a healthy man in a non-malarial zone had contracted tertian malaria after being bitten by an experimentally infected Anopheles claviger. Between 1900 and 1902, Grassi, Gustavo Pittaluga and Giovanni Noè made intensive sudies of malaria at Agro Portuense, at Fiumicino, on the Tiber, and on the plain of Capaccio, near Paestum.
In 1902, Grassi abandoned his study of malaria and began work on the sandfly responsible for Leishmaniasis (Phlebotomus papatasii) and on a serious insect pest of the grape vine ( Phylloxera vastatrix ). Endemic malaria returned to Italy during and after the First World War and Grassi resumed his mosquito studies.
He died in Rome in 1925.
Partial list
He won the Royal Society's Darwin Medal in 1896.
He was made a senator in Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III .[1]
A stamp commemorating Grassi and with his portrait was issued by the Italian post office in 1955.[2]