Hen’s eggs were scarce during the war, so the young scientist biked from farm to farm to buy her supplies. The inspiration for her research was a 1934 article by Viktor Hamburger on the effects of limb excision in chick embryos. After her expulsion, she continued her research in her bedroom lab. Levi-Montalcini’s lifelong research on NGF had begun at the University of Turin Institute of Anatomy.
Studying its behavior helped scientists develop drugs to fight the cancer. One inducer that plays a role in breast cancer, epidermal growth factor, was discovered by Cohen. Levi-Montalcini and others have described a large family of nerve growth factors that control the growth of specific cells. “She was an intuitive observer, and she saw that something was making these nerve connections grow and was determined to find out what it was.” “She had this feeling for what was happening biologically,” Cohen, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, told the New York Times recently. The work has led to improved therapeutic agents. Their research proved to be critically important to the understanding of cell and organ growth in cancers and how the growth process can go rogue in diseases such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as psychiatric disorders such as depression or anorexia. Levi-Montalcini was honored in 1986 with the Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with her colleague, Stanley Cohen, for her discovery in the 1950s of nerve growth factor (NGF), a protein that causes developing cells to grow by stimulating surrounding nerve tissue.
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“It gives you a better understanding of how to fix something that doesn’t work.” Nobel Laureateĭr. “Those insights help (scientists) with next steps that’s what basic research means – understanding how things work,” Danforth said. “She was just a very intelligent, thoughtful person who made a great discovery.”ĭanforth said her basic research led to a deeper understanding of the nervous system and how different parts of the body send out signals. “She was a great lady,” said Washington University Chancellor Emeritus William H. and the laboratories at Washington University following World War II.
Undaunted, she set up a small, makeshift laboratory in her bedroom and continued her research in secret until she made her way to the U.S.
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Two years later, her budding research career was derailed when Mussolini barred non-Aryan Italians from holding professional jobs. She graduated from medical school in 1936. Her father relented and she began the journey that would lead her to a Nobel Prize.Įn route, she was briefly waylaid by Mussolini. “At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father,” she wrote. “He loved us dearly and had a great respect for women, but he believed that a professional career would interfere with the duties of a wife and mother,” she said. Theirs was “a typical Victorian style of life, all decisions being taken by the head of the family, the husband and father,” Ms. Her father believed a woman’s place was in the home. Her death was announced by Mayor Gianni Alemanno of Rome, who called it a great loss “for all humanity.” She was 103. Levi-Montalcini, whose nerve-growth research would eventually make her the fourth woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and was the oldest living Laureate, died Sunday (Dec. Rita Levi-Montalcini had overcome two major obstacles to her scientific career: A loving, but “Victorian” father and a fascist dictator.ĭr.
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