Umberto Scapagnini (16 October 1941 – 2 April 2013) was an Italian politician, former mayor of Catania. Biography Academic career Scapagnini graduated in Medicine in 1965, and then taught Neuropharmacology in 1968 and Neuroendocrinology in 1972; from 1967 to 1973 he was a professor at the Heymans Institute of the University of Ghent, the YC Medical Center in San Francisco, and at MIT in Boston, and has been a consultant of NASA from 1969 to 1975. In 1975 he became full professor at the University of Catania, making him the youngest Italian Professor of Medical Pharmacology. Scapagnini has later been the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Catania. Scapagnini had been for years the personal physician of Silvio Berlusconi. Political career In Catania he entered into politics becoming a municipal councilor with the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1985, becoming deputy mayor and city planning councilor between 1986 and 1987. Scapagnini has later joined Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and was elected at the European Parliament in 1994; from 1994 to 1999 he has been President of the Commission for Research, Technological Development and Energy of the European Parliament. After being re-elected at the European Parliament in 1999, in 2000 he was elected mayor of Catania and was re-elected for a second term in 2005, the year in which he won against the candidate of L'Unione Enzo Bianco, former mayor of the city. In 2008, several areas of Catania, not only in the suburbs but also in the city center, remained many days without lights due to the non-fulfillment of payments to ENEL by the municipality. On 12 February 2008 he resigned as mayor and was elected Deputy in the lists of The People of Freedom in the Italian political elections of 2008. Illness and death On 16 April 2008, a few days after the election in parliament, following a car accident, he reported a thoracic trauma and is hospitalized in serious condition at the Forlanini Hospital in Rome. On 20 May 2009, the Corriere della Sera website reported the news that Scapagnini has been hospitalized on a confidential prognosis "following severe metabolic decompensation". In March 2011 he revealed that he had fought a tumor, relapsed after the 2008 car accident. On 2 April 2013, he died in Rome at the age of 71, after his health had deteriorated in the last few days, having