Donatella Marazziti, Alessandra Rossi, and Giovanni B. Cassano won a Nobel Prize in 2001 for their research in chemistry. They found that biochemically speaking, love and severe obsessive compulsive disorder are indistinguishable. Donatella Marazziti’s acceptance speech is a small classic of romantic writing in itself.
She said, “Research on love is very important, because love is the engine of human life and of the universe. However, I’m sure that despite all of our efforts, the secrets of nature will remain elusive. I only provide this small insight in to the biological mechanism of this typically human feeling.
The main bias of my research was that the sample was constituted mainly of Italians, and the Italian way of falling in love may be quite different than that of other populations, such as the Americans. Please continue to enjoy life, and continue to fall in love.” The research was published in Psychological Medicine.