Rita Levi-Montalcini

Origins and early life

Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin on 22 April 1909, with her twin sister Paola, the youngest of four children of Adamo Levi, an electrical engineer and mathematician, and Adele Montalcini, a painter. Her parents were Jewish and well-off, seldom went to synagogue except on Yom Kippur, and her father told her she could choose her own religion at twenty-one. He did not want his daughters at university, but at twenty she won his consent and studied at the medical school of Turin under the histologist Giuseppe Levi, alongside Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco.

Work and career

She graduated summa cum laude in 1936, and when the racial laws of 1938 barred Jews from academic careers she set up a laboratory in her bedroom to study nerve fibres in chick embryos, with Giuseppe Levi as her only assistant. Bombing drove the family out of Turin in 1941, and after the German invasion of 1943 they hid in Florence until its liberation in August 1944, when she became a doctor to war refugees for the Allies.

In 1947 Viktor Hamburger invited her to Washington University in Saint Louis for what was meant to be a year; she stayed for decades, and in 1952 she isolated from mouse tumours a substance that made the nerves of chick embryos grow vigorously. She then worked for years with the biochemist Stanley Cohen on this nerve growth factor, a protein essential to the growth and maintenance of nerve cells. From 1962 she divided her time between Saint Louis and a research unit in Rome, and from 1969 to 1978 directed the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Research Council.

The 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to her and Stanley Cohen “for their discoveries of growth factors”. Appointed a senator for life in 2001, she died at home in Rome on 30 December 2012, aged 103, and lies in Turin's Monumental Cemetery beside her twin.