Francesco Pietra started as a physical organic chemist at Uni Padova, Camerino and Perugia, but it was only later at Uni Pisa and abroad (especially Uni Leiden Gorllaeus lab), that he begun to have a suitable environment. In the year 1974 he acted as “Invited Lecturer of the British Council”. With the “Chair of Organic Chemistry” he moved to the University of Trento, where he was granted the large means required to start research on marine natural products, with stages in research centers on coral reefs around the world for collecting organisms for study. He did that along two new avenues, that is, from his perspective as both a physical organic chemist and a naturalist. The first one allowed relating behavior to chemical structure, the second one led to pioneering explorations of, inter alia, three forgotten taxa, marine fungi, marine ciliates and brachiopods.
Much influential was his unification of concepts about phylogeny in the sea and on Earth, in his “Structurally similar natural products in phylogenetically distant marine organisms, and a comparison with terrestrial species” Chemical Society Reviews 1995, 24, 65-71. Views that he disseminated with lectures at marine symposia, Gordon Conferences, universities and bio-pharma.
He was awarded by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in the year 1998, and was also appointed to the Centro Linceo in the same year, where he wrote “Biodiversity and Natural Product Diversity” Pergamon, Elsevier 2002. This Tetrahedron Organic Chemistry Series Volume 21 provides an all encompassing vision of the diversity of natural products in the perspective of biodiversity. He retired from the Uni in the year 2001, before the terms, upset by Faculty of Science at Uni Trento rejecting once again his proposal for a Biochemistry course, patterned on that from the Stanford University.
In the year 2007 he was elected as “Socio Ordinario” by the Accademia Lucchese di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, where he investigates nature at molecular level from computer simulations with grants by CINECA-ISCRA that allow generous access to supercomputing facilities.
Besides this no-frontiers scientific activity,his interest in epigenetics, where he published work on such subtle epigenetic readers like the BET proteins, has brought him into problems of air quality in the town where he lives, Lucca. PM is contributed by a devastating high number of cars allowed in the town, while, uncontrolled, pollutants are emitted in an aerosol during meal preparation by restaurants, which have increased in number like mushrooms after a rainfall. Problems that are exacerbated by the town being enclosed within high walls. Such pollutants comprise heterocyclic aromatic amines, such as 2-amino-1-methyl-6-phenylimidazo[4,5-b]pyridine (PhIP), classified as a potent carcinogen compound, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, like the potent carcinogen benzo[a]pyrene, and carcinogenic alpha-beta-unsaturated aldehydes, which are particularly active against humans with heterozygotic mutation BRCA2. Strikingly, while odors from cooking are rapidly dispersed away from the aerosol, the non volatile carcinogenic compounds remain with the aerosol until it drops to the ground.. It is only in the socially most advanced countries (Australia to the best) that such problems from restaurants are controlled by imposing filters to trap the aerosol. But there is a growing concern, as shown by continuing interventions in the scientific literature, like recently:
“Higher levels of PAHs were detected in the air surrounding the restaurants. Using a probabilistic risk model, researchers showed that those living in these areas were at increased risk of cancer over a lifetime and that those with more exposure had a higher risk” S. Joshi (New York University School of Medicine, New York, USA), Effects of Fumes Inhaled from Cooked Meat, J Toxicol Risk Assess 2019, 5:024 doi. org/10.23937/2572-4061.1510024 OPEN ACCESS
“Exposure of PUFA-rich culinary oils to LSSFEs [Laboratory-Simulated Shallow-based repetitive deep-Frying Episodes] for periods of up to 90 min. generates extremely high levels of hazardous aldehydic LOPs [Lipid Oxidation Products], which may present both serious and chronic threats to human health” S. Moumtaz, B. C. Percival, D. Parmar, K. L. Grootveld, P.Jansson, M. Grootveld (Leicester School of Pharmacy, Leicester, UK), Toxic aldehyde generation inand food uptake from culinary oils during frying practices: peroxidative resistance of a monounsaturate-rich algae oil, Nature Scientific Reports, (2019) 9:4125 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-39767-1. OPEN ACCESS