Rita Levi-Montalcini backed education for African women

Person: Rita Levi-Montalcini
Lived: 1909–2012
Field: Neurobiology
From: Italian

The story

Rita Levi-Montalcini knew from experience what it meant to be denied an education. Her father, an engineer who loved his children, believed a professional career would interfere with a woman's duties as wife and mother, and he decided that his daughters would not go to university. She had to ask his permission at the age of twenty, then cram the Latin, Greek and mathematics she had never been taught before she could enter medical school. Later, Italy's 1938 race laws drove her out of academic life altogether because she was Jewish.

She overcame both barriers, worked for thirty years at Washington University in St. Louis, and shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of nerve growth factor. In the second half of her life she spent much of her energy making sure that others had the chances she had been forced to fight for.

In 1992 she and her twin sister Paola, an artist, set up a foundation in memory of their father, devoted to the education of young people and above all to university scholarships for young African women. The aim was to help form a generation of women able to take leading roles in science and public life in their own countries. The Nobel Prize's account of her life describes its purpose as giving African women the tools to develop their capabilities fully.

The Rita Levi-Montalcini Foundation does this mainly through university scholarships and partnerships with universities in Africa. By 2015, according to the University of Palermo, which joined it in a campaign called "Una laurea per una laurea" (a degree for a degree), the foundation had supported about 700 students since 2001 through 48 projects. The courses it funded included nursing, medicine, gynaecology, law, agriculture and communications, as well as doctoral and postgraduate study.

The foundation reflected the causes she argued for throughout her public life, as a Nobel laureate and later as an Italian senator for life: scientific freedom, the education of the young and equal opportunity for women. It has continued its work since her death in 2012, so that her name now stands on the degrees of women training to be doctors, nurses and professionals in their own countries.

Why it matters

The foundation's scholarships have helped young African women complete university degrees in fields such as medicine, nursing and law, extending to others the opportunity Levi-Montalcini herself had to fight for.

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.

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Rita Levi-Montalcini

1909–2012 · Neurobiology

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