In 1909 Rita
Levi-Montalcini was born, near the alps in the city of Turin, Italy.
Her father, Adamo Levi was an electrical engineer, and her mother,
Adele Montalcini was an artist. When she was younger, Rita wanted to
be an author, or maybe a philosopher- only, she didn’t have the
logical mind for that.
Her childhood
was, by some regards, a wonderful one, with her parents raising their
children to have strong values and an appreciation for culture and
the people around them. While they were descended from Sephardic
Jews, the children weren’t raised religious, but instead raised to
place value on their rich cultural heritage and faith. But equally,
it was a suffocating one: Her father was an iron-willed man,
sometimes with an explosive temper, and his wife always stood second
to him. The patriarchal upbringing left Rita a shy child, and her
apprehension of her father transferred to most adults in her life.
But just as equally, it grew some iron in her: she swore to herself
she would never marry, refusing to be inferior to anyone, and
developed a resilient streak which would serve her well throughout
her life.
Then her dear
governess developed a stomach tumour and Rita decided to go into
medicine. After two years she convinced her father, as well, despite
his insistence that studying medicine would prevent her from
fulfilling her womanly duties. She promised her governess she would
make her better, and in eight months studied all the Greek, Latin,
and Mathematics her all-girls school career missed. She passed the
entrance exam to the Turin School of Medicine and became one of six
girls studying there in a class of 300 students at age 21.
Her governess
died before this.
The unrelated
Giuseppe Levi quickly caught onto Rita’s intelligence; he was an
eccentric but brilliant professor, who taught two other Nobel Peace
Prize winners. Under his guidance Rita overcame the prejudice she
faced and graduated the school with summa cum laude degree in
medicine and surgery. After, she returned as an intern to the
Institute of Anatomy where she continued to work with Giuseppe.
Like him, she was
interested in the nervous system, and had become adept at Histology,
or staining nerve cells. He gave her the task of investigating the
formation of the convolutions of the human brain. She would later
describe this as an impossible task: To investigate these
convolutions you would need human brains at various stages of
development, and this is Italy during the 1930s. Abortion was illegal
in Italy. Where would you find the embryos?
With Giuseppe’s
permission she abandoned the project and started researching the
development of the nervous system. But before she could make any
progress, it was 1938, and Mussolini’s "Manifesto per la
Difesa della Razza" (Manifesto for the Defence of Race) was
enacted. This barred any non-Aryan citizens from academic and
professional careers.
Rita didn’t
wish to put her Catholic peers in danger by remaining at the
Institute. Briefly, she accepted an invitation to a Belgium
neurological institute, but feared for her family and returned to
Turin- just as Mussolini shook hands with Hitler.
The
Levi-Montalcini’s didn’t flee Italy, despite Mussolini’s army
the Blackshirts, the round-ups and shootings, and the constant,
bone-numbing fear-
With her older
brother Gino Levi-Montalcini’s help she set up a make shift
laboratory in her bedroom in Turin to continue her work; when the
bombs fell on Turin and the family fled to the country side this
laboratory moved to the communal living space.
She would go
around the farmers and share the story of her poor, hungry and scared
children, which were also imaginary, so she could beg one or two of
their fertilized chicken eggs off them. She had saved up for a
stereomicroscope and a binocular Zeiss microscope, but for the
microscalpels she filed down spare sewing needles, making do with
what she had.
She worked
throughout the entirety of the war years. The established theory,
proposed by Viktor Hamburger, suggested that there was a factor
present in limbs which caused the nerve cells to grow into the limbs.
If, early in embryonic development you removed the buds which would
grow into limbs, nothing would call the nerve cells away from the
spine, and so they would cluster there unspecialized.
But Rita,
instead, thought it was a nutrient produced by the limbs which
preserved the differentiated nerve cells, and that without the limb
and it’s nutrient, these specialized nerve cells died. The limb
held no responsibility for their specialization in the first place.
The family had
moved down to Florence near the end of the war, and in September 1944
the Ally Forces liberated it from Nazi rule. Secretly, the
Levi-Montalcinis had been assisting the Italian resistance, and now
Rita volunteered her knowledge of medicine to become a volunteer
doctor.
She left as soon
as she could though, returning to Turin in 1945.
(The forces and
their citizens were plagued by malnutrition and typhoid; as we have
seen, she was a resilient woman, but seeing all those old people,
soldiers, and babies dying-)
This would be the
last time as a practising doctor.
Rita was unsure
how she would continue with her research after the war, but some of
her work pre-war had made its way into scientific journals. Viktor
Hamburger had learned of this peculiar woman; He invited her to the
University of Washington, with the intention of seeing who was right.
The post was, in
theory, for only a few months, and Viktor and Rita- they couldn’t
be more different. While Hamburger was a methodical and slow
scientist, Rita was a passionate one, powered by a creative and
intuitive mind. She would remain there for 30 years, until 1977, and
become a full professor.
She didn’t
abandon Italy though; her new position gave her the power to set up a
second research centre in Rome, and she became director of both the
Research Centre of Neurobiology of the CNR in Rome and the Laboratory
of Cellular Biology.
Her passion still
lay with those chicken nerve cells, though. She had convinced Viktor,
but she continued working on isolating this nutrient. Initially
working with a strain of tumour cells found in mice, she transferred
these to some chicken embryos and observed the rapid differentiation
of nerve cells and generation of nerve fibres it caused. Working with
a biochemist Stanley Cohen, she narrowed down the growth factor to a
nucleic acid and a protein; using a snake venom with enzymes which
broke down those compounds led to the surprising discovery that this
nutrient was present in many animals; they also found it produced in
the salivary glands of mice.
Together they had
isolated the Nerve Growth Factor- one instrumental in the development
of nerve cells, and so also, cancer cells. It could also, possibly,
be used to regenerate severed or damaged nerves. She and Cohen won a
Nobel Peace Prize for this discovery in 1986; When the phone rang to
tell her of this news, she was reading Agatha Christie’s Evil under
the Sun. Still, on the second-last page of that book, there is a
pencil-scrawled message saying, “call from Stockholm”,
because immediately she had returned to reading.
She didn’t
thrive under the fame the prize won, but she realised it would
provide her the opportunity to become involved in matters of
importance to her. When appointed to Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations she devoted herself to speaking
out about hunger across the world; She would travel across schools in
Italy to deliver speeches describing hope and faith. In August 2001,
at the age of 92, she was appointed as a Senator of Life by the
Italian president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
Her life was not
without controversy, of course. The Former health minister Duilio
Poggiolini suggested in 1994 that her Nobel Peace Prize had been
bought by Fidia, a company she had worked with previously. He had
recently been accused of corruption. Instead of responding with
vitriol, she said: “The allegations against Fidia cannot be true.
The process for awarding Nobel prizes is so complex that it cannot be
corrupted.”
I think, sweetest
for me, was her fight for women’s opportunities. As well as
numerous articles, she wrote a paper called "The Feminine
Awakening", which described the history of women's emancipation
movement, from the early 1800s to her present day in the 70s; her
understanding of gender dynamics was a modern one often lacking even
today: in her book In Praise of Imperfection she wrote: "The
subordinate role played by the female in a society run entirely by
men made the status of a wife less than attractive.”
And in 2001 she
established the Fondazione Rita Levi-Montalcini, a non-profit
organisation with the intention of providing education for girls and
women in Africa, because when reflecting on her life she realised she
would not have achieved what she did if not for her opportunity to
study in university. And she wished that opportunity for every woman
in the world.
As of 2009, the
foundation had funded 7,000 girls. She said, perhaps proudly: “Young
women … can now look toward a future moulded by their own hands.”
She’d live past
her siblings, her twin sister, and most people her generation,
becoming a centenarian in 2009. Even in her old age she remained
attentive and bright, dressing elegantly, holding interviews, and
attending conferences. She woke up at five each morning and slept at
11. At 100 she was still making new discoveries about the Nerve
Growth Factor.
She died in the
30th December 2012. She lived long enough to make you
wonder if perhaps, amongst those nerve cells and egg shell, she found
the secret to immortality. But, she didn’t fear death.
“I am
indifferent to my own death, that only affects my body. What will
remain of me is what I have achieved, the work I have done during my
lifetime. You don’t die at the time of your physical death. Your
message lives on. I am not in the least frightened of dying, it will
only affect this very small body that I have lived in. It is not
important when I die. The important thing is to have lived with
serenity using the rational left-hand side of one’s brain, and not
the right side, the instinctive side, which leads to misery and
tragedy.”
Perhaps it was an
active life, or a Mediterranean diet. If you are a romantic sort, you
might wonder if it’s a kind of karma; After all, can you think of
many people who’ve contributed as much to life as she did?
Sources:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/finding-the-good-rita-levi-montalcini/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/my-hero-491055.html
http://www.ritalevimontalcini.org/en/support-us/italiano-donare-il-5-x-1000-2/
http://excelle.monster.com/news/articles/3264-secret-of-longevity-no-food-no-husband-no-regrets?page=1
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/1997spring/sp97_ROHRLICH.php
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/dec/30/rita-levi-montalcini
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