Maria Carmela Lico Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

After James Reston, while accompanying Richard Nixon in a trip to China, was subjected to post-operative acupuncture at the Anti-Imperialist Hospital in Beijing, Lico got particularly interested in how this technique could induce the activity of endogenous analgesic system. At first, Lico studied the effects of electroacupuncture on human patients. Later, Lico demonstrated that the perfusate taken from the paw of a rat which was subjected to electroacupuncture could reduce or abolish the cortical evoked potential elicited by a noxious stimulus was applied to the dental pulp. They were unable to identify the analgesic substance; by 1975, when Hughes and Kosterlitz described the potent analgesic effects of endorphins, Lico and Garcia-Leme were convinced that the substance generated by electroacupuncture was an endorphin. At the end of the 1970s, Lico advised Renato Sabbatini and Isaías Pessotti, both of whom would become important behavioral scientists in Brazil.

In 1963, Lico was invited by Covian to join the faculty as a teaching assistant. In 1970, Lico made a short visit to Yale University, in the laboratory of professor José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado, where she studied the behavior of primates, applying telemetry techniques to infer physiology-behavior relationships. In 1981, Lico applied for full professorship at Ribeirão Preto, a position she held until she died of cancer in 1985.

In Argentina, Lico studied medicine and philosophy, simultaneously, at the University of Buenos Aires; however, Lico was unable to finish the latter course. Fascinated with the workings of the mind, Lico entertained the idea of following psychiatry as a field of practice during medical school, an idea that was abandoned after 2 years of clinical practice. Lico studied under Nobel laureate Bernardo Houssay at the Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental, and defended her doctorate thesis on the action of neurohypophysarian hormones on arterial pressure in the frog. While endocrinology was the field which gave Bernardo Houssay his Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, Lico was more interested in neurophysiology, an area which, at the Instituto, was under the leadership of Miguel Rolando Covian. Since Covian had recently moved to the Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto, Lico decided to move to Brazil and, in 1960, joined Covian at the University of São Paulo with the help of a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship.

Maria Carmela Lico or Licco (1927–1985) spent most of her research life as a physiologist studying the neural mechanisms of pain at the Department of Physiology of the Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto (Brazil). Lico produced important insights on the descending control of nociception by limbic structures, specially the septal nuclei.

Maria Carmela Lico was born in Italy in 1927, but soon moved with her family to Argentina. During her childhood in Italy, Lico fell ill with an infectious disease that would later “weaken her immune system” and impact her ability to stand the effects of chemotherapy, leading to her death in 1985.