This work should not have been possible without the personal and professional growth which I had thanks to the encounter with numerous outstanding personalities and institutions which I had the privilege to meet and to work with. I shall not attempt to name all of them to avoid omissions which would be inexcusable, and I shall necessarily make impersonal references. My Alma mater is the University of Trieste, Italy, where I completed my studies and later spent large part of my academic career as a professor of pharmacology and related topics. There I had the occasion to develop a critical mind towards the understanding of the world in an objective (“scientific”) perspective, aware of the fallacies of the beliefs affecting human attempts to understand the inner and outer world.