Rita Levi-Montalcini

Rita Levi-Montalcini was born on April 22, 1909 in Turin, Italy.

Her Nobel Prize co-winner Stanley Cohen ( Brooklyn, New York, 17 November 1922-5 February 2020 Nashville, Tennessee) was a professor of biochemistry emeritus.

Graduated in 1936 from medical school with a summa cum laude degree in Medicine and Surgery, and enrolled in the three year specialization in neurology and psychiatry. That same year, Benito Mussolini issued laws prohibiting non-Aryan Italian citizens from indulging in academic or professional careers; Rita's family had to seek work that would spare them from persecution. Rita wanted to continue her medical research, so she built a small research unit in her bedroom.

When the Allied armies forced the Germans to leave Florence, Italy, in August of 1944, Rita was hired as a medical doctor and assigned to a camp of war refugees. She served as nurse and medical doctor, treating typhus and other diseases.

In the years during and after World War II, Rita worked on chicken embryos, amputating their limbs to discover how this would affect the growing organism's nervous system. Her discoveries led to the description of naturally occurring cell death and of neurotrophic factors in the nervous system. Rita was invited in 1946 to continue her studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Served as Director of the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research, in Rome, 1969 to 1978.

In 1986, Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini and her colleague, Dr. Stanley Cohen (b. 1937), won the Nobel Prize in medicine for the discoveries of NGF (nerve growth factor), a substance found in malignant tumors that causes nerve fibers to grow rapidly, and of EGF (epidermal growth factor), which is used in the treatment of severe burns.