Obituary: Rita Levi-Montalcini
Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini died on Sunday, December 30th in Rome, at the age of 103. Levi-Montalcini shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine, for her contribution to the discovery of nerve growth factor. Her work gave profound insights into how the nervous system regulates the number and growth of cells during its development, and opened up hopeful avenues of research into cancer, embryology, nerve regeneration and neurodegenerative diseases which continue to this day.
Levi-Montalcini began her illustrious career in the face of huge adversity. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Turin, she studied medicine despite her father's opposition, and upon her graduation in 1936 decided to pursue a career in research. By then, the Nazis had introduced laws that banned Jews from practicing medicine and taking academic positions. Nevertheless, she set-up a makeshift laboratory in her bedroom at her parents' Turin home and, risking imprisonment or death, performed her experiments in secret. But she aroused little suspicion buying the fertile eggs needed for her research and, furthermore, the remnants of her experiments could usually be eaten afterwards.
The story of nerve growth factor began in the 1940s, when Levi-Montalcini replicated the experiments performed by Viktor Hamburger, an embryologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Working in her bedroom, using microsurgical and tissue manipulation equipment fashioned out of sewing needles and watchmaker's tweezers, she removed the limb buds from chicken embryos, and found that this led to a reduction of the number of motor neurons in the corresponding region of the spinal cord. Conversely, grafting supernumerary limbs onto the embryos resulted in a greater number of spinal motor neurons.
Hamburger had obtained the same results a decade earlier, and had hypothesized that the limb buds contain a substance that directs immature nerve cells to differentiate into motor neurons. Levi-Montalcini interpreted the data differently – she argued instead that the substance in the limb buds promotes the survival of the newborn cells. Her research was cut short by the Nazi occupation, however, which forced Levi-Montalcini to go into hiding until 1944. After a brief stint as a doctor-cum-nurse in the Allied refugee camps, she returned to Turin University as soon as the war ended to resume her research. A year later, Hamburger invited her to join him in St. Louis. Hamburger had asked her to join him for a few months, but she ended up staying 30 years.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/neurophilosophy/2013/jan/01/rita-levi-montalcini-obituary?CMP=twt_gu
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