Born on April 22, 1909, in Turin, Italy: Rita was the daughter of wealthy Italian-Jewish family. Her father, Adamo Levi, was an electrical engineer and mathematician and her mother, Adele Montalcini, was a painter. Along with her twin sister, Rita was the youngest of four children. During WW2, Rita's family was forced to flee Turin, after the invasion by the German army. They first fled to Piemonte and then to Florence, where they lived underground until the end of the war. Rita's father also believed that the pursuit of a professional career interfered with a woman's duty as a wife and mother and initially discouraged her from going to university. Seeing her mother "play second-fiddle to her father", Rita made the decision early on to never marry or have children.
However, at the age of 20, Rita persuaded her father to let her attend medical school at the University of Turin. While at the university, Rita was instructed by neurohistologist, Giuseppe Levi, who inspired her to study the developing nervous system. Two of her contemporaries at the university were Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco, both who'd go on to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology of Medicine. Rita graduated in 1936, with a degree in Medicine and Surgery. After which she enrolled in a 3-year long program, specializing in neurology and psychiatry. Rita was briefly employed as an assistant to her teacher and histologist, Giuseppe Levi, who taught her the technique of silver-staining nerve cells in order to more clearly see them under a microscope. Sadly, her studies were cut short in 1938, when Mussolini issued his Manifesto of Race, which banned "non-Aryan Italian citizens" from academic and professional careers. After which Rita set up a makeshift laboratory in her bedroom, where she fashioned scalpels from sewing needles and conducted experiments on chicken embryos, to understand how embryonic nerves form into a fully-developed nervous system. Giuseppe Levi continued to assist her in this work.
She then moved to Belgium, where she was a guest at a neurological institute, in Brussels, until the German invasion in the spring of 1940. Towards the end of the war, Rita worked as a volunteer physician for the Allied troops, treating cases of typhoid fever and other contagious diseases in refugee camps. After the war ended, Rita took up a position at the University of Turin and then in 1946, she moved to Washington University in St. Louis; working under the wing of Viktor Hamburger, who inspired her work about the development of nerve systems. Rita remained at Washington University for the next 30 years. In 1962, she started a research unit in Rome, splitting her time between there and St. Louis. Between 1961-69, Rita was director of the Research Centre of Neurobiology and from 1969-79, the Laboratory of Cellular Biology. In 1986, she shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine with her colleague Stanley Cohen, for the discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF). The prize was awarded based on her research in 1952, that tumors from mice transplanted into chick embryos caused the chicks to grow rapidly. Along with Cohen she managed to purify the nerve growth factor (basically means all the cells were very very similar) and published the mysterious protein's structure. This revelation proved that NGF was critical to the immune system. Rita was also one of the first to recognize the importance of the mast cell in human pathology and the endogenous compound palmitoylethanolamide, which was a key regulator of this cell. Her work on palmitoylethanolamide also helped the foundation for it's use as drug to treat chronic pain and neuroinflammation.
In 2002, Rita founded the European Brain Research Institute. In addition to her various scientific endevors, Rita was also a champion of scientific training for women. Rita Levi-Montalcini died on December 30, 2012, in Rome, Italy.
Side notes:
neurohistologist- someone who studies the microscopic tissue structures of the nervous system.
physiology- a branch of biology that focuses on living organisms and their parts
mast cell- a cell in connective tissues and is part of the immunity and neuroimmunity systems.
endogenous compounds- are being investigated as possible indicators of some immunity disorders ie. allergies, asthma, overexposure to tobacco smoke and air pollution.
pathology- the study of the causes and effects of diseases, dealing particularly with the laboratory examinations of tissues samples
https://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/index.php/people/summary/Levi-Montalcini
VOCÊ ESTÁ LENDO
Women in Science, Medicine and Mathematics
Não FicçãoWomen who have contributed to the fields of science, medicine and math. They paved the way for future generations, made groundbreaking discoveries, many times while being outshone or downtrodden by their male counterparts.
