Rita Levi-Montalcini

Banned from science for being Jewish, she won a Nobel Prize with a lab made from kitchen scraps.

Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in 1909 to a strict Jewish family in Turin, Italy.

Her father believed higher education would ruin a girl’s chances of becoming a proper wife and mother.

At 20, she asked for permission to become a doctor.

He reluctantly agreed.

She crammed years of education into 8 months and entered med school at the University of Turin.

She graduated summa cum laude in medicine and surgery in 1936.

Then the war hit.

In 1938, Mussolini passed the Race Laws, banning Jews from academic careers.

Levi-Montalcini was expelled from her post.

So she improvised.

She turned her bedroom into a neuroscience lab.

Built scalpels out of sewing needles.

Used a toy microscope.

And started dissecting chick embryos on her kitchen table.

She discovered something no one had seen before: neurons grew in response to signals.

And died when they lacked targets.

But she couldn’t publish in Italian journals, so she sent her papers abroad.

When the Allies bombed Turin, she packed up her lab and moved to the countryside.

When the Nazis invaded Italy, she went underground, living under a false identity and helping the Resistance.

When Florence was liberated, she worked in a refugee camp as a doctor for the Allied forces.

After the war, she returned to Turin.

But in 1946, she got a letter that would change everything.

Viktor Hamburger, a U.S. embryologist whose work she had challenged, invited her to Washington University in St. Louis.

She arrived with no money, no official position, and a handbag full of notes.

She planned to stay one semester.

She stayed 30 years.

There, she partnered with biochemist Stanley Cohen.

They found a strange tumor that caused nerve cells to explode with growth when implanted into chick embryos.

She suspected the tumor was releasing a chemical signal.

So she flew to Rio de Janeiro with two mice carrying sarcomas in her handbag.

In a borrowed lab, she ran experiments that proved it: the tumor was releasing a protein that triggered nerve growth.

She called it NGF: nerve growth factor.

Cohen later isolated it chemically.

They shared the Nobel Prize in 1986.

She became the first woman to head a research lab at Italy’s National Research Council.

She founded the European Brain Research Institute in 2002.

She launched the Rita Levi-Montalcini Foundation, which funded education for girls in Africa.

And at 92, she was appointed Senator for Life in Italy.

In 2006, aged 97, she cast the deciding vote on the national budget.

The government had slashed science funding.

She refused to vote yes unless they restored it.

The funding was reinstated. The bill passed.

Rita Levi-Montalcini never married. Never had children. Never stopped working.

She remained active in research until the day she died, at 103.