Rita Levi-Montalcini (born 22 April 1909), Knight Grand Cross is an Italian neurologist who, together with colleague Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of Nerve growth factor (NGF). Since 2001, she has also served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life.
Today she is the oldest living Nobel laureate and the first ever to reach a 101th birthday.
Born in Turin to a Jewish family, together with her twin sister Paola she was the youngest of four children. Her parents were Adamo Levi, an electrical engineer and gifted mathematician, and Adele Montalcini, a painter.
Levi-Montalcini decided to attend medical school after seeing a close family friend die of cancer,[overcoming the objections of her father who believed that "a professional career would interfere with the duties of a wife and mother". She enrolled in the Turin medical school in 1930. After graduating in 1936, she went to work as Giuseppe Levi's assistant, but her academic career was cut short by Benito Mussolini's 1938 Manifesto of Race and the subsequent introduction of laws barring Jews from academic and professional careers.
During World War II, she conducted experiments from a home laboratory, studying the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos which laid the groundwork for much of her later research. Her first genetics laboratory was in her bedroom at her home. In 1943, her family fled south to Florence, and she set up a laboratory there also. Her family returned to Turin in 1945.
In September 1946, Levi-Montalcini accepted an invitation to Washington University in St. Louis, under the supervision of Professor Viktor Hamburger. Although the initial invitation was for one semester, she stayed for thirty years. It was there that she did her most important work: isolating the nerve growth factor (NGF) from observations of certain cancerous tissues that cause extremely rapid growth of nerve cells in 1952. She was made a Full Professor in 1958, and in 1962, established a research unit in Rome, dividing the rest of her time between there and St. Louis.
From 1961 to 1969 she directed the Research Center of Neurobiology of the CNR (Rome), and from 1969 to 1978 the Laboratory of Cellular Biology.
Rita Levi-Montalcini founded the European Brain Research Institute, covering the appointment of president. Her role in this institute was at the center of some critics from part of scientific community in 2010
Controversies were raised by the collaboration of Prof. Montalcini with the Italian Pharmaceutical Factory Fidia. Since 1975 the scientist promoted the drug Cronassial produced by Fidia from bovine brain. The drug turned out some years later to be able to cause a severe neurological syndrome (Guillain-Barré syndrome). For this reason Germany banned Cronassial in 1983, followed by other countries. Italy prohibited the drug only in 1993. This episode raised serious critics to Rita Levi-Montalcini.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d9QTCWPqH8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX-81h22Dy8
