In 1943 and before the advance of the Nazi troops, the family was once again forced to flee to the south, where Rita rebuilt her laboratory in a basement in Florence. To obtain research material, she visited local farmers and asked for fertilized eggs to feed her children (which she did not have). After the alliance between Mussolini and Hitler, Allied bombs began to fall on Turin in 1941, forcing the Levi-Montalcini family to move to their cottage in the mountains. In the spring of 1940, she returned to Turin from a stay in Brussels shortly before the German invasion of Belgium took place. In the following years, Levi-Montalcini would feel the breath of the Nazi advance on the back of her neck. There she set up a laboratory with her microscope and some adapted household utensils, such as sewing needles and watchmaker’s tweezers. In 1939, with the new laws against Jews imposed by Benito Mussolini, Rita left her post at the university, transferring her experiments to her own bedroom.

Like so many other people at that time, Levi-Montalcini’s life was going to be interwoven with the political turmoil in Europe. After graduating with honours in 1936, Rita remained as a researcher under the wing of her mentor, beginning her studies on the development of the nervous system in the chicken embryo. The three were students of a figure who would be essential in the career of Levi-Montalcini, the neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi. Overcoming the reluctance of her father and her own academic shortcomings, she entered the University of Turin, where she shared the classroom with future Nobel Prize winners Salvatore Luria and Renato Dulbecco. After some hesitation, she opted decidedly for medicine. Credit: audrey_selīut at an early age, Rita understood that the complacent wife was not her place in life. Rita Levi, 98 year-old, was special guest speaker at the international NGF meeting 2008: Katzir Conference on Life and Death in the Nervous System, at Kfar Blum, Israel. Rita and her sisters were not given access to university, as this could interfere with their future role as wives and mothers, and for a well-to-do family in Turin, suitors would not be lacking. Her mother, the painter Adele Montalcini, lived subject to her husband. Hers was a Victorian family, as described by Rita herself. In fact, it is not that Levi-Montalcini could have opted for other more comfortable options, but that it would have sufficed to accept the destiny that her father, the electrical engineer and mathematician Adamo Levi, had already planned for her and her two sisters. And she not only triumphed, she won a Nobel Prize. But any researcher who is tempted to surrender to adversity has a role model to be inspired by: the Italian neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini (22 April 1909 – 30 December 2012), who built her career during a world war and overcame what in her country and time were two monumental obstacles-being a woman and a Jew. She was a scientist, but above all a humanitarian.Those who choose science as a profession know that they are not picking the easiest path, especially at the start. The crucial thing is to always keep the brain active to try to help others and retain your curiosity about the world”. What she has left us, however, is something that will never die, as she said: “The obsession with aging is ridiculous. She used to visit herlaboratory in Rome and her foundation, devoted to improving the lives of African women, every day until she died, at one hundred and three years of age.

When she was seventy-five years old, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for her studies on the multiplication of cells. Rita began her studies in medicine belatedly because her father did not thinkit wasa priority for a woman. “What matters is the way in which we live and the message we leave behind. This is essentially what Rita Levi Montalcini (Turin, 1909) meant in her speech when appointedDoctor Honoris Causa by the Complutense University (Madrid). There are some people who live such an exemplary life that their memory, as well as their knowledge, live on forever.

Rita levi montalcini