Background

Rita Levi-Montalcini was born on April 22, 1909, in Turin, Italy, to a wealthy Jewish family. Her mother, Adele Montalcini, was an artist. Her father, Adamo Levi, was an engineer and mathematician.

Rita had an older brother Gino who was one of the best-known Italian architects and a professor at the University of Turin. Moreover, she had two sisters: Anna, five years older than Rita, and Paola, her twin sister, who became a popular artist.

As was the custom in the early 20th century, Adamo discouraged Rita and her sisters from entering college. Adamo felt that the "woman's role" of raising a family was incompatible with creative expression and professional endeavors.

Education

At first, Rita Levi-Montalcini wanted to be a philosopher, then decided she wasn't logically minded enough. Then, inspired by Swedish writer Selma Lagerlof, she considered a career in writing. After her governess died of cancer, however, she decided she would become a doctor.

In 1930, Levi-Montalcini entered the University of Turin where the prominent neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi sparked her interest in the study of the nervous system. She graduated with a summa cum laude degree in Medicine and Surgery in 1936. Following her graduation, she enrolled in the three-year specialization in neurology and psychiatry.

Career

In 1938 Benito Mussolini signed the "Manifesto per la Difesa della Razza" (The Defense of the Race), which persecuted Jewish Italians among other groups. As a Jew with professional aspirations, Levi-Montalcini was forced to flee to Brussels, Belgium, where she studied as the guest of the neurological institute.

In the spring of 1940, Belgium was near invasion by Nazi forces, and Levi-Montalcini was again forced to flee prejudice stemming from World War II. Instead of immigrating to the United States, Levi-Montalcini returned to her home and family. To continue her studies on the neurological development of chicks, she developed a small laboratory in her bedroom with only an incubator, microscope, and microtome. In these cramped settings, she began a project inspired by Viktor Hamburger's research on the effects of limb excision on nerve generation. Although her results matched Hamburger's, her conclusion was different. She saw later nervous system development as a degenerative process, and Hamburger saw it as a targeted process. In 1941 Allied bombing forced her to flee with her mini-laboratory to Piemonte, in Italy's countryside. Conditions were harsh - the same eggs used for research were also eaten by the family. In 1943, after the fall of Mussolini, the Nazis invaded Italy and Levi-Montalcini fled to Florence, where she was forced to live anonymously for the duration of the war. After the war ended, she returned to Turin and began work as a postgraduate under her former instructor Giuseppe Levi at the University of Turin.

Viktor Hamburger sent a letter to Levi-Montalcini in 1947 inquiring about their conflicting results. He offered her one year of study in his lab at Washington University in St. Louis. She accepted and ended up staying for more than 20 years. She found this period one of the happiest and most productive of her life. In St. Louis, Levi-Montalcini's research in her mini-laboratory was vindicated. Her conclusion that neural differentiation is related to normal degeneration of the central nervous system, rather than the destination of nerves, was shown to be correct.

Levi-Montalcini's career was devoted almost completely to the study of the Nerve growth factor. Hamburger introduced Levi-Montalcini to work done by Elmer Bueker on a tumor abnormally invaded by nervous tissue. Levi-Montalcini obtained the tumor and over the course of many successive experiments determined that the tumor was emitting some substance causing increased growth and differentiation of the nervous tissue. She confirmed these results using a tissue culture at the University of Brazil with Hertha Meyer, a friend from her time at the University of Turin. When Stanley Cohen, a biochemist who shared the 1986 Nobel Prize with Levi-Montalcini, joined the lab in 1953, he began work to characterize the Nerve growth factor. The Nerve growth factor was determined to be a protein required for the development of the nervous system, the immune system, and was implicated in stress management.

In 1956 Levi-Montalcini became an associate professor at Washington University. She was promoted to full professor in 1958 and left in 1962 to establish the European Brain Research Institute in Rome. From 1969 to 1978 she was the Director of the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research in Rome. In 1977 she retired and was named guest professor at the Institute of Cell Biology. In 1987 she was awarded the National Medal of Science, and an autobiographical work, In Praise of Imperfection, was published in 1988.

In 2002 she founded and presided the European Brain Research Institute (EBRI), a position he held until her death at the age of 103 on December 30, 2012. During her career, Rita Levi-Montalcini received numerous and varied awards including the 1969 Feltrinelli Medical Award of the Accademia Nazionale die Lincei, the 1974 William Thomson Wakeman Award of the National Paraplegia Foundation, the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research in 1982, and the 1983 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University. In 1986 she won both the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Stanley Cohen. She was named one of the first four ambassadors of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in the campaign against world hunger.

Achievements

• Rita Levi-Montalcini was a Nobel Prize-winning neurologist who in collaboration with her colleague Stanley Cohen discovered the Nerve Growth Factor.
  
  Her discovery of the Nerve Growth Factor, and the research that led to it, gave other researchers a new way to study and understand cancers and Alzheimer's disease. Her research created fresh pathways for developing groundbreaking therapies.
  
  Levi-Montalcini's influence in nonprofit science efforts, refugee work, and mentoring students was considerable. Her 1988 autobiography is eminently readable and often assigned to beginning STEM students.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Saga of the Nerve Growth Factor: Preliminary Studies, Discovery, Further Development

    (This book is a collection of articles written by Nobel La...)

    1997
  • Senz'olio controvento 1996
  • Le tue antenate 2011
  • L'asso nella manica a brandelli 1998
  • La galassia mente 1999

Religion

Rita Levi-Montalcini wasn't religious and identified herself as an atheist.

Politics

In the 1970s Rita Levi-Montalcini supported the campaign for law in favor of abortion to prevent women from having to migrate abroad for such a purpose.

Levi-Montalcini was made a Senator for Life in 2001 and from 2005 to 2007 she played a vital role in supporting the center-left government of Romano Prodi, which had a wafer-thin Senate majority and needed every vote to stay afloat. Despite her age, Levi-Montalcini never failed it, earning the wrath of the right-wing opposition in the process.

In 2006, at the age of 97, she held the deciding vote in the Italian parliament on a budget that was backed by the government of Romano Prodi. She threatened to withdraw her support unless the government reversed a last-minute decision to cut science funding. The funding was put back in, and the budget passed, despite attempts by the opposition leader Francesco Storace to silence her. Storace mockingly sent her crutches, stating that she was too old to vote and a "crutch" to an ailing government.

Views

Levi-Montalcini was assigned the task of determining whether the number of nerve cells from mice spines stayed the same or if something around them influenced their number. It was a difficult task because she had to count the nerve cells that emerged from the spinal cord of mice. She used a technique called sliver staining which allows nerve cells to stand out from other tissue making it easier to view and count under the microscope.

Her work in the lab with Giuseppe Levi made Levi-Montalcini very interested in neurogenesis, a specific process within the study of developmental neurobiology. Developmental neurobiology helps understand how the nervous system develops during and after the embryonic stage. She was interested in answering the question, what was the factor that had an impact on the multiplication of nerve cells?

Even during World War II, Levi-Montalcini continued to use the silver staining technique to study chick embryos in her home lab. She studied how nerve cells made their way to tissues. This is when and why Levi-Montalcini rode around the countryside to attain fertilized chicken eggs. At this time a scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Viktor Hamburger, published something which interested her. However, her conclusions differed from Hamburger's. She noticed that the nerve cells kept increasing in number till they reached the damaged area where they died. She concluded that this nerve cell death was not due to a degenerative process but some factor that was important for the survival of nerve cells.

From studying mice tumor cells Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen, American biochemist, isolated a factor called the nerve growth factor (NGF). They went to great lengths to study this, even using snake venom to breakdown nucleic acids. NGF is critical for the growth of neurons as a signaling molecule. NGFs belong to the neutrophin family. Neutrophins are important for the development and maintenance of our nervous system. NGF was the first neutrophin to be identified by Levi-Montalcini. NGF is produced by target organs, released to receptors on specific nerve terminals, and then sent to the body of the neuron which helps nerve growth. NGFs are important for cell growth and survival.

If there is a malfunction in the NGF path many diseases can occur. As NGF levels drop the nerve cells do not function properly. Diseases such as diabetes and Alzheimer's are a few that occur due to low NGF levels. Alzheimer's patients in experimental trials have had NGF put into specific parts of the brain and their memory loss has slowed down. NGF has also shown to play an important role in skin and immune health.

Quotations: "Above all, don’t fear difficult moments. The best comes from them."

"I tell young people: Do not think of yourself, think of others. Think of the future that awaits you, think about what you can do and do not fear anything."

"It's not enough what I did in the past - there is also the future."

"The body does whatever it wants. I am not my body; I am my mind."

Membership

• 

  National Academy of Sciences , United States

  1968

• 

  European Molecular Biology Organization

  1974

• 

  The Pontifical Academy of Sciences

  1974

• 

  Foreign Member

  The Royal Society

  1995

Personality

Rita Levi-Montalcini's well-groomed, elegant appearance coupled with her warm, caring personality made her a sought-after mentor and role model.

As a feminist in a family with Victorian mores and as a Jewish and free-thinker in Mussolini's Italy, Rita Levi-Montalcini has encountered various forms of oppression many times in her life. Yet the neurobiologist, whose tenacity and preciseness are immediately apparent in her light, steel-blue eyes and elegant black-and-white attire, embraces the forces that shaped her. "If I had not been discriminated against or had not suffered persecution, I would never have received the Nobel Prize," she said once.

Interests

• Reading

• Politicians

  Romano Prodi

• Writers

  Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

Connections

Despite her father's hopes that his daughters would live quiet lives as wives and mothers, Levi-Montalcini described herself as lacking a maternal sense and attraction to babies and determined herself to be unfit for domesticity. In a 2006 interview, she said: "My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work, and interests. I have never felt lonely."

Father:

Adamo Levi

Mother:

Adele Montalcini

Sister:

Paola Levi-Montalcini

Sister:

Anna Levi-Montalcini

Brother:

Gino Levi-Montalcini

colleague:

Stanley Cohen

Stanley Cohen shared the 1986 Nobel prize with Rita Levi-Montalcini for research that opened the door to a clearer understanding of dementia, cancer, and other maladies.

colleague:

Viktor Hamburger

Viktor Hamburger invited Rita Levi-Montalcinito to work at Washington University in St. Louis.

References

• In Praise of Imperfection: My Life and Work
  1987