![]() ![]() Also, from 2001, until her death, she served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life. Her parents were Adamo Levi, an electrical engineer and mathem Rita Levi-Montalcini (Italian pronunciation: 22 April 1909 – 30 December 2012) was an Italian neurologist who, together with colleague Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF). Born on 22 April 1909 at Turin to a wealthy Italian family, she and her twin sister Paola were the youngest of four children. On 22 April 2009, she was feted with a 100th birthday party at Rome's city hall. Rita Levi-Montalcini had been the oldest living Nobel laureate and the first ever to reach a 100th birthday. ![]() Love, on me has the same effect of water on ducks: I am totally waterproof”! Written by Filomena Raia.Rita Levi-Montalcini (Italian pronunciation: 22 April 1909 – 30 December 2012) was an Italian neurologist who, together with colleague Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF). If in the past I have ever been courted by a man, I did not notice it. Rita never married: “I am married to science… I did not feel the need to have a child, or to be attached to any man. “These girls are starving more for knowledge than for food, and they are much more determined than men: when they have the opportunity to study, they achieve great results!” Levi-Montalcini also started a campaign to involve women in Politics: “It’s just by having a female presence in government that we will begin to have equal opportunities”. “In Africa – she said – women have to fight to study.” Because of this, Levi-Montalcini, together with her twin sister Paola, in 1992 created the Levi-Montalcini Foundation, to give young African girls the opportunity to study and achieve important leadership roles within society. She was optimistic about contemporary women’s conditions: Europe has made huge progress in the development of women in society. Levi-Montalcini always felt like a free woman but she grew up in a society where men were dominant and women had few opportunities – There was still a King on the throne in Italy until the 1946. ![]() “The difference between a man and a woman is just environmental they have the same brain, but in men its (development) was encouraged in women has been historically repressed”. She always thought that women had to fight harder than men, and carry two weights: their private and their public lives. She said that she had to fight her whole life to be accepted in the most exclusive of scientific environments: “Humanity is made of men and women, and it should be represented by both of them”. Levi-Montalcini made a great contribution not only to science, but also to society she was a great activist for social issues such as education and the emancipation of women. Rita died in 2012, at the age of 103 at her home in Rome – the first Nobel Laureate to live 100 years old. In 2001, she was named as Senator for Life by the Italian government. She discovered nerve growth factor (NGF), important for the growth, maintenance and survival of certain nerve cells, and established a Research Centre for Neurobiology in Rome in cooperation with the Italian National Research Council and Washington University. Continuing her work, she accepted an invitation to research at Washington University (Missouri) for one semester, but stayed for thirty years, being appointed as a Professor in 1958. Following the end of World War II, she returned to Italy from Belgium, opening her own laboratory in Turin. After finishing her studies, she began research into the nervous system, but fled Italy as a result of Fascism under the government led by Mussolini. Born in Turin in 1909, Rita Levi-Montalcini was an Italian neurologist of Jewish origins who received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1986. “The future of the world relies on the education of women, and by appointing them as leaders”. ![]()
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