Twins in Turin
Rita Levi-Montalcini and her twin sister Paola were born in Turin on 22 April 1909, the youngest of four children in a cultured Italian Jewish family whose roots in Piedmont ran deep. Their father, Adamo Levi, was an electrical engineer and gifted mathematician; their mother, Adele Montalcini, was a painter. Rita would later combine both surnames. Their older brother Gino became one of Italy’s best-known architects, and Paola a celebrated painter and sculptor.
It was, as Rita later described it, a warm and loving home, but a Victorian one, in which the father made the decisions. Adamo Levi respected women but believed a professional career would interfere with the duties of a wife and mother, and he decided that none of his daughters would go to university. Rita, who had admired the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf and once dreamed of being a writer, found that role impossible to accept.
Medical school against the odds
When a family governess she loved died of stomach cancer, Rita resolved to become a doctor. At twenty she asked her father’s permission to pursue a career, and he relented. In eight months she made up the Latin, Greek and mathematics her girls’ school had not taught her, passed her final school examinations and entered the medical school of the University of Turin.
Her teacher there was the formidable histologist Giuseppe Levi, who trained her in the rigorous study of the developing nervous system. Two of her fellow students and friends in his laboratory, Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco, would also go on to win Nobel Prizes. She graduated summa cum laude in medicine and surgery in 1936 and began specialising in neurology and psychiatry, still undecided between clinical medicine and research.
Expelled by the race laws
The decision was made for her. In 1938 Mussolini’s regime published the so-called Manifesto of Race and introduced laws that barred Jews from universities and the professions. Levi-Montalcini lost her position. She worked for a time as a guest at a neurological institute in Brussels, but returned to Turin in the spring of 1940, shortly before the German invasion of Belgium.
Her family faced a choice between emigrating to the United States and staying in Italy, quietly, with no connection to the official “Aryan” world around them. They stayed. And Rita, unable to work in any institution, decided to build a laboratory at home.
A laboratory in the bedroom
She set it up in her bedroom: an incubator, a microscope, a microtome for cutting thin slices of tissue, and surgical instruments she improvised herself, sharpening sewing needles into tiny scalpels and using watchmaker’s tweezers. Her subject was the chick embryo. Inspired by a 1934 paper by the German-American embryologist Viktor Hamburger on what happens to developing nerves when a limb bud is removed, she began repeating and extending his experiments. Her old teacher Giuseppe Levi, himself a Jew forced out of his post, joined her as her only assistant.
Eggs were scarce in wartime. She cycled around the countryside buying fertilised eggs from farmers, telling them they were for her babies because they were more nutritious; after the experiments, the family often ate the rest. When Allied bombing of Turin made the city too dangerous, the family moved to a cottage in the Piedmont countryside, and she rebuilt her laboratory there.
Her results matched Hamburger’s, but her interpretation did not. He believed the developing limb sent out a signal that told nerve cells to multiply and differentiate. Levi-Montalcini, looking more closely and more often, saw that the nerve cells were produced normally but then died when their target was missing, suggesting that they depended on some substance from the target to survive. She published her findings in foreign journals, since Italian ones were closed to her.
Hiding in Florence
In September 1943 Italy surrendered to the Allies and German forces occupied the north and centre of the country, bringing deportations of Jews with them. The Levi-Montalcini family fled to Florence, where they lived underground until the end of the war under false identities, protected by non-Jewish friends. Rita was in contact with partisans of the anti-fascist Action Party.
When the Allies liberated Florence in August 1944, she went to work as a doctor for the Anglo-American forces, assigned to a camp for war refugees where epidemics of infectious disease and typhoid were killing people daily. Serving as both nurse and doctor, she shared, in her own words, the refugees’ suffering and the daily danger of death. When the war in Italy ended in May 1945, she went home to Turin and to her academic post.
St. Louis and the discovery of NGF
Then Viktor Hamburger, who had read her wartime papers, invited her to Washington University in St. Louis to work with him for a semester. She arrived in 1947, planning to stay a year; she stayed for three decades, and later called her years there the happiest and most productive of her life.
In St. Louis she noticed that a mouse tumour transplanted into chick embryos caused nerve fibres to grow wildly, invading tissues and even blood vessels, as if the tumour were releasing some powerful growth-promoting substance. To pin it down she needed a simpler test system. In 1952, in an episode that became famous, she flew to Rio de Janeiro carrying two tumour-bearing mice, reportedly in her handbag, to work with her friend Hertha Meyer, who ran a tissue-culture laboratory there. In glass dishes she watched nerve fibres sprout from embryonic ganglia in a dense halo around pieces of tumour. The substance was real.
Back in St. Louis she was joined by the biochemist Stanley Cohen, who set out to purify it. In a celebrated piece of serendipity, Cohen added snake venom to his preparations to break down nucleic acids, and found the effect grew stronger, because the venom itself was rich in the factor. Reasoning that snake venom glands resemble mammalian salivary glands, he found an even richer source in the salivary glands of male mice, and isolated the protein. They called it nerve growth factor, or NGF. By 1959 they had shown that an antiserum against NGF destroyed parts of the nervous system in newborn mice, proving that it was essential.
Why it mattered
NGF was the first growth factor ever discovered, the first of a large family of signalling proteins that tell cells when to survive, grow, divide or die. It overturned the idea that the nervous system is wired by a fixed genetic plan alone, showing instead that neurons compete for life-sustaining signals from the tissues they connect to, and that many die when they lose out. Cohen’s related discovery of epidermal growth factor opened a parallel field.
The concept transformed biology and medicine. Growth factors are now central to understanding cancer, in which cells escape the normal controls on growth; to research on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and on nerve injury and repair; to wound healing; and to the immune and endocrine systems, which Levi-Montalcini later showed are also influenced by NGF. Drugs that block growth-factor signalling are now standard cancer treatments. In 1986 Levi-Montalcini and Cohen shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of growth factors. The omission of Hamburger, whose work had made theirs possible, drew criticism from some of his colleagues.
Rome, the Senate and a long life
Levi-Montalcini became a full professor at Washington University in 1958. From 1962 she divided her time between St. Louis and Rome, where she set up a research unit and later directed the Institute of Cell Biology of Italy’s National Research Council. She retired from Washington University in 1977 but never stopped working. In the 1990s she drew attention to the role of mast cells in disease. In 2002 she founded the European Brain Research Institute in Rome. Her long association with the pharmaceutical company Fidia, whose ganglioside drug Cronassial was withdrawn in several countries after safety concerns and became the subject of a bribery investigation in Italy, brought her public criticism in the 1990s.
She was famously elegant, sewed many of her own clothes and never married, saying she had no regrets. She was close to her twin, Paola, all her life. In 2001 the President of Italy appointed her a senator for life, and she took her duties seriously, attending the opening of a newly elected Senate in 2006 at the age of ninety-seven. In 2009 she became the first Nobel laureate to reach the age of one hundred. She died at her home in Rome on 30 December 2012, aged 103.
Legacy
Levi-Montalcini’s life is one of science’s great stories of resilience: a woman forbidden first by her father and then by the state to do the work she loved, who did it anyway in her bedroom with sewing needles and farm eggs, and laid the groundwork for one of the twentieth century’s fundamental biological discoveries. She was the first woman admitted to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a foundation bearing her name supports the education of girls and young women in Africa.
She was also a moral voice in Italian public life, speaking for scientific freedom, women’s education and the young. Asked late in life about the persecution she had suffered, she reflected that without it she might never have built the laboratory that led to her life’s work, a characteristically unsentimental view from a woman who turned exclusion into discovery.
Sources & further reading
Rita Levi-Montalcini, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Obituary: Nobel Laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini, Washington University in St. Louis · Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012), Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University · Rita Levi-Montalcini, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.