ROME — Nobel Prize-winning biologist
Rita Levi-Montalcini, a biologist who conducted underground research in defiance of Fascist persecution and went on to win a Nobel Prize for helping unlock the mysteries of the cell, died at her home in Rome on Sunday. She was 103 and had worked well into her final years.
Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, announcing her death in a statement, called it a great loss “for all of humanity.” He praised her as someone who represented “civic conscience, culture and the spirit of research of our time.”
Italy’s so-called “Lady of the Cells,” a Jew who lived through anti-Semitic discrimination and the Nazi invasion, became one of her country’s leading scientists and shared the Nobel medicine prize in 1986 with American biochemist Stanley Cohen for their groundbreaking research carried out in the United States. Her research increased the understanding of many conditions, including tumors, developmental malformations, and senile dementia.
Italy honored Levi-Montalcini in 2001 by making her a senator-for-life.
A petite woman with upswept white hair, she kept an intensive work schedule well into old age. “At 100, I have a mind that is superior - thanks to experience - than when I was 20,” she said in 2009.
During her research at Washington University in St. Louis, she discovered nerve growth factor, the first substance known to regulate the growth of cells. She showed that when tumors from mice were transplanted to chicken embryos they induced rapid growth of the embryonic nervous system. She concluded that the tumor released a nerve growth factor that affected certain types of cells.
Levi-Montalcini had no children and never married, fearing such ties would undercut her independence.
Arkansas, Pages 8 on 12/31/2012