"Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist who began her seminal research on cell development while dodging bombs and fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II, died Dec. 30 at her home in Rome. She was 103. ...Dr. Levi-Montalcini was widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of her generation, and her accomplishments were particularly notable because of the handicaps and obstacles faced in science by women throughout the world when she began her career.Her rise to the highest reaches of scientific achievement was made even more difficult because she embarked on her career under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, who expelled her and her fellow Jews from the Italian academic world. She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in medicine for her discovery of a substance known as the nerve growth factor, a naturally occurring protein that helps spark the growth of nerve cells. She launched that groundbreaking research in a makeshift bedroom laboratory during the war and deepened it in the 1950s at Washington University in St. Louis, where she worked alongside her co-Nobelist, the American biochemist Stanley Cohen." - Lit

"In essence, Dr. Levi-Montalcini’s discovery helped explain how embryonic nerve cells grow into a fully developed nervous system and, more broadly, how a damaged nervous system might be repaired. Cohen was credited with the identification of the epidermal growth factor, a similar substance that helps regulate the growth of skin and other cells. Together, those advances “opened new fields of widespread importance to basic science,” the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute declared in awarding the prize to the two scientists. The nerve growth factor is considered a foundation for modern research into treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and has also influenced research on cancer, Parkinson’s disease and muscular dystrophy. Writing in the journal Science in 2000, Dr. Levi-Montalcini attributed her success to “the absence of psychological complexes, tenacity in following the path I reputed to be right, and the habit of underestimating obstacles.” Rita Levi-Montalcini was born April 22, 1909, in the northern Italian city of Turin. Her mother, Adele Montalcini, was a painter; her father, Adamo Levi, was an engineer and subscribed to the then-prevailing view that women were best suited to the domestic life. “It was he,” Dr. Levi-Montalcini wrote in an autobiography, “who had a decisive influence on the course of my life, both by transmitting to me a part of his genes and eliciting my admiration for his tenacity, energy and ingenuity; and, at the same time, by provoking my silent disapproval of other aspects of his personality and behavior.” She discovered her affinity for science in her early 20s and gravitated toward medical research because she had lost a beloved governess to cancer. Dr. Levi-Montalcini received a medical degree in 1936 from the University of Turin, where her classmates included the future Nobel laureates Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco." - Lit