Rita levi montalcini biography of rory and dean

Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini was born into an intellectual, though traditional, family in Turin, Italy in At the age of twenty, realizing that she could not fulfill the feminine role envisioned by her father, Levi-Montalcini persuaded him to allow her to enter the University of Turin to study medicine. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Turin Medical School in , and then completed a degree for specialization in neurology and psychiatry in Two of her university colleagues and friends, Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco, also were to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in and respectively.

All three were trained in biological science by the famous Italian histologist, Giuseppe Levi.

Rita Levi-Montalcini, Professor Emeritus of Biology, Washington University (St.

Fascist laws prevented Italian Jews from practicing medicine or working in universities at that time, so Levi-Montalcini was forced to work with neither support from nor connection to the outside Aryan society. Inspired by a article by Viktor Hamburger reporting on the effects of limb extirpation in chick embryos, she set up laboratory equipment in her bedroom to continue her research on neurogenesis, studying the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos.

When the Germans invaded Italy in the fall of , the family moved to Florence where they lived underground until the end of the war. After Allied armies forced the Germans out of Florence in August , Levi-Montalcini worked as a medical doctor in an Italian refugee camp, treating epidemics of infectious diseases and abdominal typhus.

"Homage to Rita Levi Montalcini".

After the war, her family returned to Turin and Levi-Montalcini resumed her position as an assistant at the University of Turin Institute of Anatomy. Two articles that Levi-Montalcini had published in foreign scientific journals caught the interest of Viktor Hamburger, head of the Zoology Department of Washington University in St.

Though she initially planned to stay at Washington University for ten to twelve months, Levi-Montalcini stayed for thirty years. She was named an associate professor of Zoology in , and a full professor in In the early s Levi-Montalcini began dividing her time between St. Louis and Italy.