In our ongoing series "Embracing intersectionality in science: the key to innovation and sustainability," let's discover the remarkable life and contributions of Rita Levi-Montalcini.
Her journey as a Jewish woman in science during tumultuous times exemplifies how intersectionality can foster unique perspectives and groundbreaking discoveries.
Becoming a neuroscientist
When Rita Levi-Montalcini first dreamed of becoming a scientist in early 20th century Italy, she faced a formidable opponent: her own father. Like many Jewish patriarchs in 1909, he believed a woman's destiny lay in marriage and motherhood, not microscopes and medical books.
With her mother's continuous advocacy and her own steady will, she gradually wore down her father's resistance, winning the right to pursue her true calling.
Her brilliance proved undeniable.
In 1936, she graduated summa cum laude from the Turin School of Medicine, mastering both medicine and surgery.
Yet it was in the laboratory of neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi where Rita found her true passion.
As she peered through microscopes, and start developing nerve cells, the traditional path of a practicing physician began to fade. Instead, a deeper question beckoned:
How does our nervous system build itself from scratch?
This question would drive her remarkable scientific journey for decades to come.[1]
A scientist during war time
Just as Rita Levi-Montalcini's scientific career began to soar, the dark clouds of fascism descended over Italy.
In 1938, Mussolini's brutal Race Laws shut the doors of academia and professional life to Jewish citizens like her.
Her promising studies in neurology and psychology were then stopped abruptly.
These discriminatory laws were only the beginning.
What followed were the darkest pages of 20th century history - events so horrific they remain engraved in our collective memory: the Holocaust.
Evasion and survival strategies
Like many Jewish families in war-time Europe, Rita Levi-Montalcini and her loved ones became masters of survival and reinvention.
In 1939, Rita Levi-Montalcini's made a daring escape to Belgium, seeking refuge and a chance to continue her research. However, the looming threat of Nazis' invasion, soon drove her back to Italy in 1940. Determined, she transformed her bedroom in Turin into a clandestine laboratory, pursuing her scientific passion in secret.
As the war intensified, so did the family's need to stay one step ahead of danger. In 1941, with bombs raining down on Turin, they fled to the relative safety of the countryside. But even this rest was short-lived.
By 1943, the WWII conflict forced them to be displaced once again, this time to Florence. There, they disappeared into the underground, adopting false identities and living in the shadows until the city's liberation in August 1944.
Throughout this perilous odyssey, Rita Levi-Montalcini's determination never fainted. She carried her makeshift lab with her, rebuilding it at each new location, proving that her scientific spirit could not be extinguished even in the darkest of times.
Rita Levi-Montalcini's bedroom laboratory
Rita Levi-Montalcini's makeshift laboratory was a remarkable example of scientific ingenuity and determination in the face of adversity.
It serves as a vital space for experimentation and innovation, while traditional resources were unavailable or impractical. It highlights her creativity on finding ways to pursue their research goals under challenging conditions.
In her bedroom in Turin, Rita Levi-Montalcini built something remarkable: a simple but effective science lab. The room wasn't special - just a long, narrow space with a window looking out onto a quiet courtyard. But what made it extraordinary was how she turned everyday items into scientific tools. She placed a simple wooden table by the window, using natural light to help her work. This humble setup, created from basic materials, would become the birthplace of important scientific discoveries.
Her main tools were two microscopes. The first was a basic one she used to start her observations. The second was more advanced, with two eyepieces, a camera, and clever mirror setup that let her see tiny details in the specimens she studied. Her brother helped by building her an egg incubator - basically a box with a thermostat and fan to keep eggs at the right temperature. She also had a simple heater she used to melt wax, and shelves where she kept all her equipment and materials neatly organized.
What made Rita truly resourceful was how she used ordinary household items for her research. For example, she took a regular sewing needle, carefully sharpened it herself, and used it instead of expensive lab tools to perform delicate work on embryos. As the war forced her family to keep moving, she had to pack up her lab and rebuild it wherever they went - whether that was in a quiet countryside house or squeezed into a small corner of a basement in Florence.
Life was incredibly difficult during the war, but Rita Levi-Montalcini never gave up.
Food was scarce, so she had to ride her bicycle from village to village just to find eggs for her experiments. Sometimes, when food was extremely hard to find, she even had to eat the embryos she was studying to survive. Despite all this - the bombs falling, having to hide from fascist soldiers, and constantly moving to new places - she kept doing her research. Every time they moved, she would set up her lab again, determined to continue her scientific work no matter what.[2]
Rita Levi-Montalcini's discoveries during war time
Working with chicken eggs, Rita Levi-Montalcini noticed something fascinating. When she removed the part that would become a wing, something unexpected happened to the nerve cells that were supposed to connect to that wing. At first, these cells grew normally – but then they mysteriously disappeared.
It is like workers showing up to build a house, only to find there was no house to build, so they packed up and left.
This led her to an even more surprising discovery.
Even in perfectly healthy developing chickens, many nerve cells would naturally die off. This was revolutionary – nobody had realized that cell death was actually a normal part of how bodies develop.
But why would this happen?
Rita proposed a brilliant explanation: developing body parts (like wings) produce a special survival substance. The nerve cells compete for this substance, like hungry birds fighting for crumbs. Only the cells that get enough of this substance survive and make the final connections.
It's nature's way of ensuring that nerves connect to exactly the right places.
Your body has billions of nerve cells that need to connect perfectly, like an incredibly complex telephone system. Rita's discoveries helped explain how this system gets wired up so precisely during development.
Though she published her findings in French and Italian journals during the war, few people noticed at first. But these bedroom laboratory discoveries laid the groundwork for her later work on what she called "nerve growth factor" – work that eventually won her the Nobel Prize.
This is an incredible example of how great discoveries can happen anywhere – even in a makeshift bedroom lab during wartime – when someone is determined enough to find answers.[3]
Resuming Academic Work in Italy
In 1945, after the liberation of Italy, Levi-Montalcini returned to Turin and resumed her position at the University of Turin. This allowed her to reintegrate into the formal academic environment and continue her research in a more stable setting.
The Invitation
In September 1946, Professor Viktor Hamburger, head of the Zoology Department at Washington University, extended an invitation to Rita Levi-Montalcini for a one-semester research fellowship. This invitation was prompted by Hamburger's interest in two articles, mentionned above.
These publications, which detailed her groundbreaking work on nerve growth in chicken embryos, had caught Professor Viktor Hamburger's attention despite the challenging circumstances under which they were produced.[4]
From Short-Term Visit to Long-Term Collaboration
What was initially planned as a maximum twelve-month stay evolved into a 30-year tenure at Washington University.
Upon arriving, Levi-Montalcini replicated the results of her home laboratory experiments, impressing Hamburger who then offered her a research associate position.
Key Achievements at Washington University
During her time at Washington University, Levi-Montalcini persued her work and made several groundbreaking discoveries. She became a full professor of Zoology at Washington University in 1958.
Nerve Growth Factor (NGF)
Before her work, scientists thought that once your body was fully grown, nerves could not grow or repair themselves. It was like thinking that if you cut a wire in an electrical system, it could never be fixed – the connection was permanently broken.
Levi-Montalcini discovered something called nerve growth factor (NGF), which works like a "grow and repair" signal for nerve cells. Imagine it like a special key that unlocks the nerve cells' ability to grow, survive, and heal themselves. She found this by studying certain tumor tissues that mysteriously made nerve cells grow very quickly.
This discovery was revolutionary for several reasons:
It completely changed our understanding of how the nervous system works. It showed that nerves aren't static but can actively grow and regenerate.
It helped explain how our bodies develop properly. NGF acts like a construction manager, telling nerve cells where to grow and how to make the right connections during development.
It opened new doors for treating various diseases, such as:
- Alzheimer's disease
- Pain conditions
- Certain eye diseases
- Some types of cancer
To give you an everyday example: imagine you burn your finger. The reason you can eventually regain feeling in that burned area is partly thanks to NGF helping your nerve cells repair themselves.[5]
Between 2 continents
In the early 1960s, Levi-Montalcini began dividing her time between St. Louis and Italy:
She established a laboratory at the Higher Institute of Health in Rome, which participated in a joint research program with Washington University from 1961 to 1969.
In 1969, she established the Laboratory of Cell Biology of the Italian National Research Council in Rome, serving as its director until 1979.[1]
Wining a Nobel Prize
For her groundbreaking work, Levi-Montalcini shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine, with Stanley Cohen, in 1986. Theirrevolutionary discoveries transformed our understanding of cellular biology and human development.
Rita Levi-Montalcini earned her share of the Nobel Prize by uncovering a fundamental principle that overturned decades of scientific dogma. Her discovery of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) proved for the first time that cell growth could be regulated by specific chemical signals, a concept that had never been demonstrated before. Through meticulous research, she showed that NGF was not just another protein but a master regulator of nerve cell survival and development. This breakthrough fundamentally changed our understanding of how the nervous system develops and functions, opening new avenues for treating neurological conditions.
Stanley Cohen's Nobel-worthy contribution began with his work on NGF but led to an even broader revolution in cell biology. His serendipitous discovery of Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF) revealed that growth factors weren't unique to nerve cells but represented a universal language of cellular communication. By characterizing EGF and its receptor, Cohen uncovered a whole new paradigm of how cells interact with their environment. This discovery was particularly significant because it showed that cells have specific molecular "receivers" (receptors) for these growth signals – a finding that would later become crucial for developing targeted cancer therapies.
Together, their discoveries merited the Nobel Prize because they revealed an entirely new dimension of biology: the existence of a sophisticated chemical signaling system that controls cell growth and development.
This breakthrough has:
Revolutionized our understanding of embryonic development
Provided crucial insights into cancer formation and treatment
Led to the development of numerous targeted therapies
Created an entirely new field of research in cell signaling
The impact of their work continues to resonate in modern medicine, particularly in cancer treatment, where drugs targeting growth factor pathways have become a cornerstone of therapy.
Their discoveries didn't just answer existing questions – they opened up entirely new fields of scientific inquiry that continue to yield breakthroughs today.
Their work also beautifully demonstrates how fundamental scientific discoveries, even when made without immediate practical applications in mind, can lead to transformative medical advances decades later. This powerful combination of fundamental discovery and practical medical application perfectly embodies the spirit of the Nobel Prize in Medicine.[6]
Levi-Montalcini retired as professor emeritus of Biology from Washington University in 1977. She died in 2012 at 103 year old.[1]
Her legacy
Rita Levi-Montalcini was more than just the discoverer of NGF. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1986, she became a powerful advocate for science and women's education. She established a foundation supporting African women and children's education, and as an Italian Senator for Life, successfully defended research funding against cuts. She founded the European Brain Research Institute in 2002, leading it until her death in 2012. Despite facing sexism and anti-Semitism, she remained devoted to scientific discovery, which she valued above all.[3]
Conclusion
Rita Levi-Montalcini's extraordinary journey and scientific legacy exemplify how intersectionality in science can drive groundbreaking innovation. As a Jewish woman in fascist Italy, she faced multiple layers of discrimination, yet these very challenges shaped her resourcefulness and resilience.
Working from a makeshift bedroom laboratory during wartime, she demonstrated how constraints can spark creative solutions – a principle increasingly relevant to today's sustainability challenges.
Levi-Montalcini's work also demonstrates how fundamental research can yield unexpected applications across multiple fields. From her initial observations of nerve growth, her discoveries have branched into treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, wound healing, and cancer therapy. This interconnected impact mirrors the principles of sustainability, where solutions often require understanding the complex relationships between seemingly unrelated systems.
Levi-Montalcini's story underscores how inclusion, resilience, and cross-disciplinary thinking are not just ethical imperatives but essential catalysts for breakthrough discoveries that can sustain and improve life for future generations.
This article is part of a series exploring the importance of intersectionalty in science for innovation and sustainability
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