Instead of staying for a semester, she was to remain with the university for more than 30 years. Louis for a semester so that they could re-examine the problem together. Hamburger read one of the papers Levi-Montalcini co-authored during the war and, in 1946, invited Levi-Montalcini to come to St. Studying the nerve cells at more frequent intervals, she noted that they did proliferate initially, but then died because the limb bud was not producing some sort of growth factor needed for their maintenance. Repeating the experiments in her makeshift laboratory in Turin, Levi-Montalcini made similar observations, but reached a different conclusion.
He concluded that they failed to grow because the limb was not producing an organizing factor on which they depended. When the limb buds had been removed, the embryonic nerve cells (motor ganglia) were fewer in number. To test this hypothesis, he removed developing limb buds from chick embryos to see whether nerve cells near the spinal cord would still grow toward the limb. Hamburger held that the growth and differentiation of nerve cells depended on some inductive agent emanating from their destination. In 1935, Hamburger began a nearly 50-year tenure at Washington University, including 25 years as chairman of the zoology department, later renamed the Department of Biology. Levi-Montalcini’s studies of chick embryos were given a new direction when she read a 1934 paper by Viktor Hamburger, PhD, considered the father of developmental neuroscience. This period of her life (1940-1945) appears on an early typewritten curriculum vitae in Washington University’s Archives as work for a “private laboratory.” Levi-Montalcini and her family fled to a farm near Florence and went into hiding for the rest of the war. In 1943, Italy switched allegiance to the Allies and the Germans invaded northern Italy. She told the farmers the eggs were “for her babies” because they were “more nutritious” than unfertilized eggs. She would bicycle to neighboring farms to buy fertilized chicken eggs, she said in an autobiographical essay she wrote for the journal Science in 2000. Levi-Montalcini left the university and continued her research in a laboratory she set up in her bedroom.
DR RITA LEVI MONTALCINI PROFESSIONAL
In 1938, Mussolini issued a manifesto barring non-Aryan Italians from professional and academic careers. When her governess died of stomach cancer, Levi-Montalcini decided to become a doctor, graduating summa cum laude in 1936 from the Turin School of Medicine. “It was a very patriarchal society, and I simply resented from early childhood that women were reared in such a way that everything was decided by the man,” she told Marguerite Holloway for a 1993 profile in Scientific American.
Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin, Italy, to parents who didn’t want their daughters to pursue college educations.
In her autobiography, I n Praise of Imperfection: My Life and Work, Levi-Montalcini described her years at Washington University as “the happiest and most productive years of my life.” Hundreds of growth factors are now known to exist and they affect almost all facets of biology. In 1986, Levi-Montalcini shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with biochemist Stanley Cohen, PhD, also of Washington University, who helped her identify the factor. Levi-Montalcini discovered nerve growth factor, a cellular “factor” that the body uses to direct the growth of nerve networks. Rita Levi-Montalcini, PhD, a Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist who performed the majority of her research at Washington University in St.
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