Rita Levi-Montalcini has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.
Neurobiologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1986
Italy · 1909–2012
Neurobiologist who discovered nerve growth factor, sharing the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Stanley Cohen. Barred from academic work by Italy's 1938 racial laws, she continued experimenting in a home laboratory during the war, and later divided her career between Washington University in St. Louis and Rome. She served as a senator for life in the Italian Senate.
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Ever since adolescence, [my elder sister Anna] has been an enthusiastic admirer of the great Swedish writer, the Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and she infected me so much with her enthusiasm that I decided to become a writer and describe Italian saga "à la Lagerlöf". But things were to take a different turn.
Recorded Laureate-written autobiography for Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 December 1986 source
The two alternatives left then to us were either to emigrate to the United States, or to pursue some activity that needed neither support nor connection with the outside Aryan world where we lived. My family chose this second alternative. I then decided to build a small research unit at home and installed it in my bedroom. My inspiration was a 1934 article by Viktor Hamburger reporting on the effects of limb extirpation in chick embryos. My project had barely started when Giuseppe Levi, who had escaped from Belgium invaded by Nazis, returned to Turin and joined me, thus becoming, to my great pride, my first and only assistant.
Recorded Laureate-written autobiography for Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 December 1986 source
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