Newswise — The Sbarro Health Research Organization congratulates Senator Ignazio R. Marino on his recent winning of the mayoral race for the Italian Capital, Rome. Before embarking on his political career, Dr Marino worked as a Professor of Surgery, first in Pittsburgh and then in Philadelphia, where he chaired the Division of Transplantation of the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
Dr Marino was mentored by a pioneer in the field of liver transplantation and founded, in 1999, the first liver transplant center in Sicily in a partnership between the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the Italian government.
More recently, Dr Marino received the first ‘ Giovan Giacomo Giordano National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) Award for Ethics and Creativity in Medical Research’, a prize recognizing talented scientists-physicians who distinguished for their ethical conduct and principles.
Italian researchers from the Sbarro Institute welcomed with enthusiasm the news of the run-off outcome, which saw him well ahead his challenger, the previous mayor Gianni Alemanno. “Dr Marino is a an outstanding surgeon and a excellent scientist”, say coauthors of his studies, “but, above all, he is a fair person always available to confront on delicate issues and keen to support a right cause”. Consistently, while being a Senator, Dr Marino collaborated to Sbarro-funded researches on stem cells and on the role of the environment on cancer development, including the study of the effects of years of illegal waste dumping in the Campania region. Dr Marino also contributed to studying how to define the real tumor burden in Italy, by opening up new avenues for an improved measurement of cancer numbers, through the hospital discharge records. To pursue these aims, Dr Marino helped to overcome quite a few hurdles, at the Institutional level.
Dr Marino was also the main promoter, along with the recently disappeared Nobel Prize Rita Levi Montalcini, of a law to guarantee research funding to skilled young scientists.
Dr Marino, as himself declared, has always been committed to improve people quality of life, both as a doctor and a politician. Managing a complex town as Rome is not an easy task, especially now that the world is facing a global economic crisis. While Italians have lost trust in their political class and the country is falling apart, the big hope is that Dr Marino, starting from the Capital, Rome, will be able to reinstate dignity and ethical values in the whole country. Italian SHRO scientists wish him luck for his new enterprise at City Hall.
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