Rita levi montalcini biography yahoo weather channel

An Italian scientist, Rita Levi-Montalcini helped discover the chemical tools the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerves. This knowledge underpins current investigation into how these processes go wrong in diseases like dementia and cancer. Rita Levi-Montalcini was the daughter of a wealthy Italian Jewish family. Her father, Adamo Levi, was an electrical engineer and mathematician and her mother, Adele Montalcini, was a painter.

Together with her identical twin sister, Levi-Montalcini was the youngest of four children. They fled first to Piemonte and then to Florence where they lived underground until the end of the war.

The scientific community was notified of the passing of the legendary neuroscientist hero, Academy of Science Member and Nobel laureate, Rita Levi Montalcini.

Seeing her mother play second-fiddle to her father and the subordination of many women around her, Levi-Montalcini made the decision early in life never to marry or have children. In her twenties she decided to pursue a life in medical research after seeing a close family friend die from stomach cancer. Brought up by a father who believed that a professional career interfered with the duties of a wife and mother, Rita Levi-Montalcini was initially discouraged from going to university.

Eventually, however, at the age of 20 Levi-Montalcini persuaded her father to let her attend medical school at the University of Turin. While at the university Levi-Montalcini was taught by the neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi who awakened her interest to study the developing nervous system. Two of her contemporaries at university were Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco, both of whom would go on to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Biography (Life) of Rita Levi-Montalcini – Female Italian scientist, neurophysiologist.

Rita graduated in with a summa cum laude degree in Medicine and Surgery and then enrolled in a three year specialisation in neurology and psychiatry. Her studies, however, were cut short when, in , Mussolini issued his Manifesto of Race which barred non-Aryan Italian citizens from academic and professional careers. This promoted her to go to Belgian where she was a guest at a neurological institute in Brussels until the German invasion in the spring of