farmdoc's blog post number 429

Today, like last Thursday, I write of an inspiring woman with Holocaust connections. Ashamedly I’d never heard of her until I read pages 79-80 of The Brain That Changes Itself. On 22 April 1909 Rita Levi-Montalcini (pictured) was born in Turin to a Sephardic Jewish family. She graduated in medicine from the Turin medical school in 1936. Two years later, when Mussolini barred Jews from practising medicine and doing scientific research, she fled to Brussels. When the Nazis threatened Belgium, she returned to Turin and did neurological research in a secret laboratory in her bedroom. She fashioned surgical probes from sewing needles. In 1940 when the allies bombed Turin she fled to Piedmont where, on a table in a mountain villa, she experimented with eggs from a local farmer. After each experiment she ate the eggs. After the war, she and biochemist Stanley Cohen isolated a protein that promoted nerve growth. They called it nerve growth factor, or NGF. As a result they were awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Almost three months ago, when Levi-Montalcini turned 100-years-old, she became the first, and only, Nobel Laureate to do so. Since 2001, she’s been an Italian Senator with lifetime tenure. On 22 April 2009 – her 100th birthday – she was feted with a birthday party at Rome’s city hall. Though with impaired vision and hearing, this remarkable woman has vowed to remain a force in Italian politics. I salute her.