Rita Levi-MontalciniDied 30 Dec 2011 at age 102 (born 22 Apr 1909). Italian-American neurologist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1986 (with Stanley Cohen) for her discovery of NGF (nerve growth factor), which stimulates and influences both the normal and abnormal the growth of nerve cells in the body. In Italy, as a Jew, during WW II she was denied an academic career by Mussolini's laws, so she set up a laboratory in her home to study the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos. In 1952, while at a cell culture laboratory in Rio de Janeiro, she found effective new ways to detect a chemical exuded by tumors that produced astonishing growth of nerve fibers. This was the discovery of the nerve growth factor that won her the Nobel Prize.« |
