Rita Levi-Montalcini, Italian, a wonderful representative of the fair sex – a doctor, embryologist and neurologist. She started her scientific work after the war. Apart from the difficulties arising from the very fact of being a woman scientist in those years, her life was not made easier by her Jewish origin. Despite Mussolini’s bans from studying, she resolutely continued to work in the laboratory – not at the university, but in her own bedroom, where she grew nerve cells. It was this research that earned her the Nobel Prize in 1986. Rita Levi-Montalcini discovered the nerve growth factor (NGF), the isolation of which improved the diagnosis and treatment of many neurological diseases – incl. Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. Levi-Montalcini died at the age of 103, but remained professionally active three years before her death.
AUTHOR: mgr inż. Renata Kowalczyk