Rita Levi-Montalcini

• Born: April 22, 1909
• Birthplace: Turin, Italy
• Died: December 30, 2012

Italian American neurophysiologist

Rita Levi-Montalcini is best known for her work concerning growth factors in cells. Her research into nerve and cell growth has created a better understanding of how embryos develop.

Primary field: Biology

Specialty: Neurophysiology

Early Life

Rita Levi-Montalcini and her twin sister, Paola, were born in Turin, Italy, on April 22, 1909. Their father, Adamo Levi, was an electrical engineer and mathematician; their mother, Adele Montalcini, was a painter. As a young girl, Levi-Montalcini planned to become a writer, but she also had an early interest in medicine. She and her sisters were forbidden from going to college or pursuing any kind of a career, however, and according to tradition, she was sent to a girl’s school to prepare for a life as a wife and mother.

Though she tried to conform to her father’s rules, by the age of twenty, Levi-Montalcini was frustrated by her inability to pursue her passions. At her request, her father allowed her to study Latin, Greek, and mathematics. Within eight months, she had finished high school and entered the Turin School of Medicine, where she studied under neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi. Levi was well known for his work studying the microscopic structure of tissues, and his instruction had a tremendous effect on Levi-Montalcini’s life and work. She graduated summa cum laude from medical school in 1936.

In 1938, while Levi-Montalcini was working as a research assistant in Levi’s laboratory, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini issued his Manifesto della razza (Manifesto of race). The document, influenced by German dictator Adolf Hitler, forbade “non-Aryan” Italians from pursuing professional or academic careers. It represented one of the first steps toward World War II and the persecution of Italian Jews. An opportunity to study at a neurological institute in Brussels, Belgium, seemed at first to be Levi-Montalcini’s chance to escape the oppressive regime, but shortly after she arrived, the German army invaded Brussels, forcing her to return to Turin. Levi-Montalcini’s family had remained in Italy, cutting themselves off from the “Aryan” world and attempting to keep a low profile; there, amid the turmoil, Rita studied and conducted research in private.

Life’s Work

Levi-Montalcini faced severe difficulties during World War II. As a woman, she was belittled; as a scientist, she was distrusted; and as a Jew, she was ostracized and threatened. She continued her research in secret throughout the war, building a small laboratory in her bedroom to conduct experiments on amputation and nerves using chicken embryos. Giuseppe Levi, her former mentor, escaped Belgium when Germany invaded and was able to flee to Turin, where he assisted her with her secret experiments.

In 1942, when Turin was bombed by the Allies, Levi-Montalcini’s family fled to northern Italy, spending some time near Asti before eventually settling in Florence under a false name. With each move, Levi-Montalcini recreated her laboratory and continued her research. Despite the conditions, she made amazing discoveries about cell growth and degradation. Her work during this time concerned the question of how nerves in embryos found their way from the spine into the limbs.

When the Allies liberated Florence in 1944, Levi-Montalcini was hired to work as a doctor in a refugee camp. She treated hundreds of wounded soldiers and civilians before the war finally ended in 1945. She then moved back to Turin with her family and resumed her academic career. In 1947, Levi-Montalcini was invited to continue her studies on nerve growth at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She expected her stay in St. Louis to be temporary, but the success of her research and the recognition she received resulted in a semipermanent move.

Even though her official position at Washington was in the zoology department, much of the research Levi-Montalcini was performing had important implications for human medicine. Continuing her experiments with chicken embryos, she found that the nervous system is the first to develop and start working and discovered that nerve cells adapt to different tasks as an animal grows, but she was only beginning to understand the process by which that development and differentiation occurs. She determined that some as-yet-undiscovered substance was causing the nerves to grow.

Levi-Montalcini found a piece of the puzzle in 1952, when she discovered a protein in vertebrates that causes cells to grow and divide—evidence of the first of many factors that cause cell growth. She paired up with biochemist Stanley Cohen, with whom she would later share the Nobel Prize, to study mouse tumors that had been implanted in chicken embryos, continuing work she had begun years earlier. In 1956, Levi-Montalcini and Cohen found the unknown substance that Levi-Montalcini had previously proposed, which they called nerve growth factor (NGF).

NGF stimulates nerve tissue, which causes adjacent cells to grow. Levi-Montalcini and Cohen’s discovery of how cells grow helped to explain cancer and similar diseases in which cell growth is altered or corrupted. The pair realized that the NGF in tumor cells is the cause of increased cell division in surrounding cells. Eventually, they determined that NGF is present in many kinds of health cells as well. Even though there remained many questions about the function of NGF, and about other growth factors present in animals, Levi-Montalcini had opened the door to a new area of inquiry that continues to concern doctors and scientists.

Levi-Montalcini was made a full professor at Washington University in 1958. A citizen of the United States since 1956, she nevertheless retained a connection with her native Italy, and in 1961, she established a laboratory at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Superior Health Institute) in Rome. From then on, she split her time between St. Louis and Rome. As she gained renown in the United States, she continued her support of the sciences in Italy, establishing the Institute of Cell Biology at Italy’s Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council) in 1969, where she subsequently served as director for the next ten years. Levi-Montalcini’s devotion to her home country was recognized by Pope Paul VI in 1974, when she became the first woman to be nominated by the Vatican to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

After a long and fruitful career at Washington University, Levi-Montalcini retired from her position as professor in 1977, turning most of her attention to her work with the Institute of Cell Biology and serving as a guest professor there after her retirement from the directorship in 1979. She and Cohen were finally awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine in 1986, thirty years after their discovery of the nerve growth factor (NGF) and epidermal growth factor (EGF). In 1988, Levi-Montalcini published her autobiography, In Praise of Imperfection: My Life and Work, in which she discusses her discoveries, her wartime experiences, and the nature of the scientific community. In 1999, the United Nations recognized her past contributions and her continued work in using science to better the world when they named her an ambassador in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s world hunger campaign. She celebrated her one hundredth birthday in April 2009, the first ever Nobel laureate to do so.

Impact

Since the discovery of NGF in 1956, Levi-Montalcini and other researchers have devoted decades to the study of the behavior, properties, and source of nerve cells. While there are many factors that influence the growth of nerve cells, NGF was the first to be isolated and identified. Among Levi-Montalcini’s more recent discoveries is that when treated with NGF from murines (a group of rodents that includes most rats and mice), the cells of the central nervous system undergo greater growth and differentiation. Her research into nerve and cell growth has not only created a better understanding of how organisms work but also paved the way for groundbreaking treatments for cerebral palsy, Alzheimer’s disease, and other neurological diseases.

Levi-Montalcini has received the Max Weinstein Award for her contributions to neurological research. Her other honors include the International Antonio Feltrinelli Prize from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the William Thomson Wakeman Award from the National Paraplegia Foundation, the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research from Brandeis University, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University, the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, and the National Medal of Science.

Bibliography

Abbott, Alison. “Neuroscience: One Hundred Years of Rita.” Nature 2 Apr. 2009: 564–67.

Carey, Benedict. "Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, Nobel Winner, Dies at 103." The New York Times, 30 Dec. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/science/dr-rita-levi-montalcini-a-revolutionary-in-the-study-of-the-brain-dies-at-103.html. Accessed 23 Mar. 2017.

Holloway, Marguerite. "Finding the Good in the Bad: A Profile of Rita Levi-Montalcini." Scientific American, 30 Dec. 2012, www.scientificamerican.com/article/finding-the-good-rita-levi-montalcini. Accessed 23 Mar. 2017.

Levi-Montalcini, Rita. In Praise of Imperfection: My Life and Work. Trans. Luigi Attardi. Basic, 1988. Print.

MacIntire, Guy K., ed. Nerve Growth Factor: New Research. Hauppauge: Nova Science, 2009.