Rita Levi-Montalcini - Infinite Women

Born: 22 April 1909, Italy
Died: 30 December 2012
Country most active: United States, Italy
Also known as: NA

Rita Levi-Montalcini OMRI OMCA was an Italian neurobiologist. She won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with her colleague Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF). Because of her scientific achievements, she also served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life from 2001 until her death in 2012. She was also a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust.
Levi-Montalcini was made a full professor at Washington University in St. Louis in 1958. In 1962, she established a second lab in Rome, dividing her time between there and St. Louis. In 1963, she became the first woman to receive the United Cerebral Palsy Association’s Max Weinstein Award, for her significant contributions in neurological research. From 1961 to 1969, she directed the Research Center of Neurobiology of the CNR (Italy’s largest research council) in Rome, and from 1969 to 1978, the Laboratory of Cellular Biology. She was appointed as director of the Institute of Cell Biology in Rome in 1977, retiring from that position in 1979. Levi-Montalcini founded the European Brain Research Institute in 2002, and served as its president.

The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.

Neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini earned the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of the nerve growth factor in 1952 and 1953. Her work laid the foundation for our understanding of neurodegeneration, because nerve growth factor regulates the growth, maintenance, proliferation, and survival of neurons. But like so many women in the sciences and elsewhere, it was not an easy path. As a Jewish woman, she faced both religious and gender discrimination throughout her life and career.
Born in 1909 in Turin, she graduated from medical school in 1936, specializing in neurology and psychiatry. Unfortunately, the start of her career coincided with persecution of “non-Aryan” academics under Italy’s Fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, as well as the impacts of World War II on the country. Although she carried out what small-scale research she could at home, the young scientist was forced to leave Turin in 1941 for Piemonte and had to flee to Florence in 1943, where she worked as a doctor in a refugee camp.
In 1947, Levi-Montalcini was invited to Saint Louis’s Washington University, to collaborate with Professor Viktor Hamburger, whose 1934 paper had inspired the research she had been doing mostly in secret for the previous decade. She would stay at the university for the next three decades until her retirement, becoming an associate professor in 1956 and full professor in 1958. But she was also doing work in Europe during this time, establishing a research unit in Rome in 1962, serving as director of the Italian National Council of Research’s Institute of Cell Biology from 1969 to 1978 and co-founding the European Brain Research Institute in 2002.
In fact, it was on a research trip to Rio de Janeiro to use Hertha Meyer’s laboratory at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro that she had a breakthrough with her tissue cultures responding to grafted sarcomas by promoting neuron growth and nerve cell differentiation. Because of initial skepticism about her findings, it wasn’t until the 1970s that research in this area proliferated, particularly investigating nerve growth factor’s connection to neurodegenerative diseases.
Levi-Montalcini was also a social activist, promoting science and education and fighting prejudice. In 2001, she was named an Italian senator for life. Her 2008 book Le tue antenate: Donne pioniere nella società e nella scienza dall’antichità ai giorni nostri (Your Ancestors: Pioneering Women in Society and Science from Antiquity to the Present) highlighted the lives and achievements of underrepresented women in science and social movements. She also established the Rita Levi-Montalcini Foundation to support African girls pursuing careers in the sciences.