- Person
- Rita Levi-Montalcini
- Lived
- 1909–2012
- Field
- Neurobiology
- From
- Italian
The story
Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin in 1909 and graduated in medicine and surgery from the University of Turin in 1936, staying on to train in neurology under the histologist Giuseppe Levi. In 1938 Mussolini's racial laws barred Italian Jews from academic and professional careers, and she was forced out of the university. After a short stay at a neurological institute in Brussels, she came home to Turin in the spring of 1940 as Germany was about to invade Belgium.
Rather than emigrate, her family chose to stay in Italy, and she decided to keep doing research on her own. She set up a small laboratory in her bedroom with an incubator, a microscope and a microtome. According to the Nobel Prize's account of her life, she made scalpels from sharpened sewing needles and worked with an eye surgeon's fine scissors and a watchmaker's forceps. She cycled to nearby farms to buy fertilised eggs, telling the farmers they were more nutritious for her babies. Her inspiration was a 1934 article by the embryologist Viktor Hamburger on what happens to nerves in chick embryos when a limb bud is removed. Giuseppe Levi, also expelled for being Jewish, soon joined her as her only assistant.
Allied bombing of Turin in 1941 drove the family to a cottage in the Piedmont countryside, where she rebuilt the laboratory. Conditions were so hard that eggs left over from experiments ended up on the family table. When German forces occupied Italy in 1943, the family fled to Florence and lived there under false names until liberation. She then worked as a doctor for the Allies in a camp for war refugees, where epidemics were raging.
Because Jews could not publish in Italian journals, she sent her results abroad. Hamburger read them, and in 1946 he invited her to Washington University in St. Louis to look again at the problem together. She arrived in 1947, planning to stay a year, and remained for thirty. There she discovered nerve growth factor (NGF), a protein that nerve cells need to grow and survive. The biochemist Stanley Cohen, who joined the work in 1953, helped isolate and characterise it, and the two shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986.
Her story is now one of the best known in science: proof that serious discovery can begin with a few tools and a refusal to stop asking questions.
Why it matters
The discovery of NGF, rooted in her wartime home experiments, opened a whole field of research into how nerve cells grow and survive, knowledge used today across neuroscience and medicine.
About Rita Levi-Montalcini
Italian-Jewish neuroscientist who, barred by Mussolini’s race laws, ran a secret lab in her bedroom, and later discovered nerve growth factor, winning the 1986 Nobel Prize.
More about Rita Levi-Montalcini
- Rita Levi-Montalcini founded a brain institute at 93In 2002, at the age of ninety-three, Rita Levi-Montalcini founded the European Brain Research Institute in Rome and served as its president.
- Rita Levi-Montalcini spotlit mast cells in diseaseIn the 1990s, then in her eighties, Rita Levi-Montalcini was one of the first scientists to point out the importance of the mast cell in human disease.
- Rita Levi-Montalcini flew mice to Rio in her handbagIn 1952 Rita Levi-Montalcini flew to Rio de Janeiro with two tumour-bearing mice in her handbag, and the experiment she ran there gave the first definitive evidence of nerve growth factor.
- Rita Levi-Montalcini saw nerve cells die without targetsWorking with chick embryos during the war, Rita Levi-Montalcini found that young nerve cells die when the tissue they should connect to is missing, a key insight into how nervous systems form.
- Rita Levi-Montalcini opened the science of growth factorsNerve growth factor, discovered by Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen, revealed a whole class of signalling molecules, and their 1986 Nobel Prize honoured the discovery of growth factors.
- Rita Levi-Montalcini fought her way into medical schoolRaised in a home where her father ruled out university for his daughters, Rita Levi-Montalcini persuaded him at twenty to let her study medicine, and went on to win a Nobel Prize.
- Rita Levi-Montalcini backed education for African womenThrough a foundation bearing her name, Rita Levi-Montalcini supported the education and research of girls and young women in Africa and Italy.
Sources
- Rita Levi-Montalcini: Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012) Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University
- Rita Levi-Montalcini (Women who changed science) NobelPrize.org
- Obituary: Nobel Laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini Washington University in St. Louis
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.