In 2023, Marcello published his memoir Adventures in Gut Neuroscience: A Biography. In this book, he summarises some of his world-renowned research on the organisation and function of the so-called “little brain in the gut”: the Enteric Nervous System. Along the way, Marcello recounts some of his adventures in the wilderness and his plan to develop a novel perspective of the relation between the brain in the external world.
From the Introduction…
This is the story of Marcello, an Italian boy with a complex, but not unusual, psychological make-up. How this boy turns into a lifelong researcher? What motivated him? What mental processes shaped his philosophical perspectives and which life events influenced his career and research?
My research is not, in itself, the main reason for writing this memoir. Rather, I hope that it might enable others to see into a young mind and understand how and why research took a life-time hold. What questions arose in my young mind? How did scientific principles emerge as I went about doing ‘science’?
“The way I have come to see this life-story might seem amazing: I imagine that events were just brush strokes – all different in colour, size, pattern, some done as an authoritarian, others done just holding a colleague’s hand – and all these activities are coming together and there is a picture, an almost completed painting, not ready to be framed, but rather to my liking (in case you wonder)” – So a very close friend verbalised my thoughts better than I could!
As I go through the steps in my scientific career, I will comment on the significance of my published papers, written with the help of almost 200 colleagues. There are also many influential people whom I met along the way. I apologise to those not mentioned in this summary.
I will also add some of the perspectives I developed while writing reviews and chapters for scientific meetings, and will attempt to place my research in a broader historical context. The advances in my work consist, as in most scientific research, of small journeys taken, step by step, alongside colleagues. But this is necessarily a personal perspective.
I initiated numerous lines of research, some never completed and some leading to dead-ends. A few had some influence on the work of others. After confirmation by my peers, some ideas have been accepted, at least in part. Personal ideas are often part of a collaborative intellectual movement with explanations for which history is ready. My research was largely improvised and often had no explicit goals, but was triggered by curiosity, applying available techniques..
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One of Marcello’s first attempts to visualise nerve cells in the wall of the intestine, using a method developed in the late 19th century.