| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
Born in Turin, Levi-Montalcini overcame the objections of her father - who believed that "a professional career would interfere with the duties of a wife and mother" - and enrolled in the Turin medical school in 1930, graduating in 1936. However, her academic career was cut short by Mussolini's 1938 Manifesto della Razza and the subsequent introduction of laws barring Jews from academic and professional careers. During World War II, she conducted experiments from a home laboratory, studying the growth of nerve fibers in chick embryos which laid the groundwork for much of her later research.
In 1947 Levi-Montalcini accepted an invitation to Washington University in St. Louis, where she did her most important work: isolating nerve growth factors. She was made a Full Professor in 1958, and in 1962 established a research unit in RomeRome ( Italian and Latin Roma is the capital city of Italy, and of its Lazio region. It is located on the lower Tiber river, near the Mediterranean Sea, at 41°50'N, 12°15'E. The Vatican City State, a sovereign enclave within Rome, is the seat of the Roman, dividing the rest of her time between there and St. Louis.
In 1986 Levi-Montalcini and collaborator Stanley Cohen received the Nobel Prize in Medicine, as well as the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical ResearchThe Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research is awarded by the Lasker Foundation for the understanding, diagnosis, prevention, treatment, and cure of disease. The award frequently precedes a Nobel Prize in Medicine: almost 50% of the winners have go. This made her the fourth Nobel Prize winner to come from Italy's small (<50,000) Jewish community, after Emilio Segrč, Salvador LuriaSalvador Edward Luria ( August 13, 1912 February 6, 1991) was a naturalized American microbiologist whose pioneering work on phage helped open up molecular biology. Luria was born in Torino, Italy, but fled to France in 1936 and then to the United States (a university colleague and friend) and Franco ModiglianiFranco Modigliani ( June 18, 1918 September 25, 2003) was an Italian-American economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and winner of The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1985. Born in Italy, he left Italy for.