Frontiers of Life

The American biologist Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin, Italy, and earned her M.D. from the University of Turin in 1936. After she became a clinical neurobiologist, Italy's anti-Jewish laws forced her to work in Belgium. After Germany occupied northern Italy in World War II, she went into hiding in Florence and then served as physician to the Allied invaders. When the war ended, Levi-Montalcini joined Viktor Hamburger, a pioneer in experimental embryology and a German expatriate who was chair of the department of zoology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Together they began experimental research on the regulatory mechanisms controlling motor and sensory nerve cells.…  More This research launched Levi-Montalcini's own pioneering work in the mechanisms of neurogenesis. During the early 1950s, Levi-Montalcini visited the Institute of Biophysics in Rio de Janeiro; its innovative in vitro culture unit helped shape the course of her future research. Soon after returning to Washington University, she was joined by the biochemist Stanley Cohen, who collaborated with her from 1953 to 1959 on research into the nerve growth factor (NFG), a natural substance that stimulates the growth of nerve cells and fibers, and its chemical and biological properties. Using immunological methods, they discovered the determining role of NFG in cell differentiation and survival. For this pioneering work, they later shared the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1986. By 1961 Levi-Montalcini was dividing her research career between Washington University and her own Center of Neurobiology in Rome, a research center supported by the Italian government. Later renamed the Laboratory of Cell Biology, it has departments of cell biology, immunology, and physiological genetics. Thanks to the efforts of Levi-Montalcini, by the late 1980s and 1990s, NFG research had become a major area of interest for scientists engaged in genes coding, recombinant DNA technology, and genetic engineering.  Less