Rita Levi Montalcini died in Rome on December 30, 2012, at the age of 103.
A person who reaches the age of 103 is noteworthy news, but if that person is a Nobel Prize winner, it is the only front page news in the world. Today we dedicate the biography to the Italian scientist who managed to achieve both goals, the neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini. She was born on April 22, 1909 in Turin, Italy, at a time when being a woman and a scientist seemed an impossible pairing. But the prejudices of that time were not made for Rita. Despite all her impediments, she managed to obtain a doctorate in Neurosurgery and began an unstoppable career that never stopped, until her death forced her to rest on December 30, 2012.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (1986)
Rita Levi-Montalcini was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1986. According to the phrase of the Swedish Academy, for “her discoveries on nerve growth factors.”
It is always fascinating to think that all the trillions of cells that make up an adult human being, with its variety of tissues and organs, came from a single primordial cell. Building such a complex structure is not easy. To reach the goal, millions and millions of events have to occur, each one of them in the right place and at the right time of development.
The discovery
For a long time it was thought that the orders that allow the formation and maintenance of the magnificent cellular network that forms the human body came from specialized glands far from the place where the transformation occurs. However, it turned out that this was not the only way, there are also processes that operate on a local scale. Many types of cells make and release substances that influence the growth and development of cells around them. The first to reveal the existence of this local signaling system were Rita Levi-Montalcini and the American biochemist Stanley Cohen.
Rita Levi-Montalcini discovered that transplanting tumor cells from mice into chicken embryos produced marked growth of nerves, regardless of whether the tumor cells were inside or outside the bag containing the embryo. Rita became convinced that some substance emitted by the tumor must be responsible for nerve growth, contrary to what was thought back in the 1950s, which was when she made the discovery. With this thought in mind, she designed a series of experiments that allowed her to discover the culprit substance: Nerve Growth Factor (NGF).
Levi Montalcini and his colleague Stanley Cohen discovered that there was a remarkable amount of NGF in the saliva of mammals and in the venom of snakes, this is how they achieved sufficient quantities of the product to purify the responsible protein and determine its structure.
We invite you to listen to the biography of Rita Levi-Montalcini and marvel at her lucidity and clarity of ideas expressed in the interesting interview that we offer below: