#Rita levi montalcini free#

If in the past I have ever been courted by a man, I did not notice it. More Nobel Laureate Professor Rita Levi Montalcini has been granted orphan drug designation by the US FDA for the treatment of retinitis pigmentosa (RP). Rita never married: “I am married to science… I did not feel the need to have a child, or to be attached to any man. “These girls are starving more for knowledge than for food, and they are much more determined than men: when they have the opportunity to study, they achieve great results!” Levi-Montalcini also started a campaign to involve women in Politics: “It’s just by having a female presence in government that we will begin to have equal opportunities”. “In Africa – she said – women have to fight to study.” Because of this, Levi-Montalcini, together with her twin sister Paola, in 1992 created the Levi-Montalcini Foundation, to give young African girls the opportunity to study and achieve important leadership roles within society. She was optimistic about contemporary women’s conditions: Europe has made huge progress in the development of women in society. The discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF) by Rita Levi-Montalcini in the 1950s represents an important milestone in the processes that led to modern cell.

#Rita levi montalcini free#

Levi-Montalcini always felt like a free woman but she grew up in a society where men were dominant and women had few opportunities – There was still a King on the throne in Italy until the 1946. “The difference between a man and a woman is just environmental they have the same brain, but in men its (development) was encouraged in women has been historically repressed”. She always thought that women had to fight harder than men, and carry two weights: their private and their public lives. She said that she had to fight her whole life to be accepted in the most exclusive of scientific environments: “Humanity is made of men and women, and it should be represented by both of them”. Levi-Montalcini made a great contribution not only to science, but also to society she was a great activist for social issues such as education and the emancipation of women. Rita died in 2012, at the age of 103 at her home in Rome – the first Nobel Laureate to live 100 years old. In 2001, she was named as Senator for Life by the Italian government. She discovered nerve growth factor (NGF), important for the growth, maintenance and survival of certain nerve cells, and established a Research Centre for Neurobiology in Rome in cooperation with the Italian National Research Council and Washington University. Continuing her work, she accepted an invitation to research at Washington University (Missouri) for one semester, but stayed for thirty years, being appointed as a Professor in 1958. Following the end of World War II, she returned to Italy from Belgium, opening her own laboratory in Turin. After finishing her studies, she began research into the nervous system, but fled Italy as a result of Fascism under the government led by Mussolini.

Born in Turin in 1909, Rita Levi-Montalcini was an Italian neurologist of Jewish origins who received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1986. She received her latest honorary degree, from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for this new development.“The future of the world relies on the education of women, and by appointing them as leaders”. Her and her coworkers' latest discovery is the important role of the nerve growth factor (NGF) in diseases that have to do with allergy. She continues her research although she is no longer involved in laboratory work because of her deteriorating vision. We had two meetings, one at her Institute and the other at her home.

1922) of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, “for their discoveries of growth factors.” When I visited her in June 2000, * she was 91 and still very active. She shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1986 with Stanley Cohen (b. 1909 in Turin, Italy) is Director Emeritus of the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research (CNR) in Rome.