Eventually, in 1986, she and Cohen shared the Nobel for their discoveries. It was in St Louis that she joined a biochemist, Stanley Cohen, to prove the existence of nerve-growth factor (NGF), finally silencing her critics with the publication in 1971 of the elusive protein’s structure. Once the war was over, Hamburger noticed the clarity of her work he invited her to St Louis to continue her experiments, and there she stayed, on and off, until her retirement in 1979 (though she never really retired, snapping that it led to decay of the brain). Her own experiments, using scalpels made out of sewing needles, persuaded her that what the buds actually produce is a substance that stimulates nerve growth. In 1934 Viktor Hamburger, an embryologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, had suggested that limb buds produce an attractive chemical signal. Levi, barred too, now came to work for her in secret, their roles reversed.įirst there, and later in a safer house in the countryside (where she would cycle round from farm to farm, collecting the necessary eggs), the pair worked on the problem she made her own: how nerves growing out from an embryonic spinal cord find the particular developing limbs they will innervate. Undaunted-laughingly defiant, in fact, that il Duce should think her “inferior”-she set up a primitive lab in her bedroom to carry out work on chicken embryos. The fascists, however, had other plans for her, and in 1938 barred her from academia. On her graduation in 1936 she became an assistant to Giuseppe Levi, a histologist who taught her the technique of silver-staining nerve cells so that they could be seen more clearly under a microscope. Quite against his wishes, she enrolled in medical school. Her father, a mathematician, electrical engineer and all-round “Victorian”, believed that women should not study. The battles raged right from the beginning, at the heart of her wealthy Jewish family in Turin. Both were a matter of precision, of flair, and of insisting-sometimes loudly, sometimes in silence-on what she wanted. Along the way, she proved that you can exude bella figura from every pore and still win the world’s highest intellectual honour. She conducted her early experiments in hiding, but rose to the pinnacle of Italian public life. Rita Levi-Montalcini saw her scientific discoveries sniffed at throughout the 1950s and 1960s, only to win the Nobel prize for physiology in 1986. In 2009, Montalcini was appointed Senator for Life by the Italian government, and held the post until her death in 2012, aged 103.THE advantage of living to a very great age is that you tend to have the last word. Thereafter, she continued to split her work between Italy and the United States. As a result of their discoveries, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1986. During the Second World War, her family hid, and after Italy’s liberation, she worked as a medical doctor treating refugees.Īfter the war, Montalcini moved to the United States to research the DNA and RNA present in snake venom alongside Stanley Cohen at Washington University. She moved to Belgium to continue her research, but returned to Italy after Nazi invasion, and set up a laboratory in her bedroom to study chicken embryos. Sadly, her academic career in Italy was cut short by antisemitic laws which banned Jews from attending university. She graduated from Turin University in 1936, despite her father’s disapproval of her continuing her education.

She originally wanted to become a writer, but after seeing her friend afflicted with stomach cancer, she decided to become a doctor. Montalcini was born in Turin in 1909 to Sephardic Jewish parents. Rita Levi-Montalcini (22 April 1909 – 30 December 2012) was an Italian neurologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for her contributions to neurology.

Rita levi montalcini