Rita Levi-Montalcini, 1986 Nobel Prize winner

To date, the Nobel Prize in the area of Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to women only 11 times – the first in 1947. Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini became a Nobel Laureate along with her Washington University research partner Dr. Stanley Cohen in 1986 for their identification of nerve growth factor as a protein. This discovery (made between 1953 and 1959) has made a significant impact on later research in the areas of cancer and Parkinson’s disease. 

Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin, Italy, in 1909. “The four of us (brothers and sisters) enjoyed a most wonderful family atmosphere, filled with love and reciprocal devotion. Both parents were highly cultured and instilled in us their high appreciation of intellectual pursuit. It was, however, a typical Victorian style of life, all decisions being taken by the head of the family…. (Father) … had a great respect for women, but he believed that a professional career would interfere with the duties of a wife and mother. He therefore decided that the three (girls) would not engage in studies which open the way to a professional career and that we would not enroll in the university. At twenty, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role and asked him permission to engage in a professional career.”

In 1936, Levi-Montalcini graduated from medical school and enrolled in a three-year specialization in neurology and psychiatry. When Mussolini’s government barred academic and professional careers to non-Aryan Italian citizens, she fled to a neurological institute in Brussels, returning to Turin just before the Nazis invaded Belgium. She built a small research unit in her bedroom at her family home. Inspired by the work of embryologist Viktor Hamburger, she began research on chick embryos that led her to hypothesize the existence of nerve growth factor. In 1943 her family fled to Florence where they were hidden and supported by the anti-fascist urban underground for the remainder of the war.

In 1946, Viktor Hamburger invited Levi-Montalcini to the United States, where her hypothesis on nerve growth factor was confirmed experimentally, “offering scientific proof that there is a physical connection between a sound mind and a sound body.”

Quote source: “Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1986,” edited by Wilhelm Odelberg.

TOBY ROSSNER (tobyross@cox.net) was the director of media services at the Bureau of Jewish Education from 1978 to 2002. This is one of a series on Jewish women scientists.