Senator for life: Rita Levi-Montalcini, an inspiration to women in the sciences, receives France's Legion of Honour award in December 2008.
Credit: AFP
Hard of hearing and nearly blind, she is the grand old lady of the Italian Senate, where she became senator for life in 2001; an honour bestowed on former presidents and prominent figures in social, scientific, artistic or literary fields.
The neurologist and developmental biologist shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1986 with U.S. colleague Stanley Cohen for their groundbreaking discovery of growth factors.
The Nobel committee cited the pair for advancing "our knowledge from a stage when ... growth factors were unknown, to a situation today when the role of growth factors in cell proliferation, organ differentiation, and tumour transformation is generally recognised."
Their work has helped understanding of such disorders as cancer, birth defects and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
In her political role, she cut short a trip to Dubai in 2007 to help then-Prime Minister Romano Prodi survive a confidence vote. Later, she helped the 2008 budget squeak through the upper house.
Levi-Montalcini has vowed to continue exercising her "right and duty" to vote alongside elected senators despite her age and sniping from elements of the right.
"The body may die but the messages that we have sent in life remain. Mine is 'believe in values'," Levi-Montalcini said at an early birthday party hosted by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.
Her latest accolade was France's Legion of Honour, which she received in December last year.
Enjoying great affection and respect in Italy, she intervened to defend the teaching of evolution in schools when, in 2004, the then education minister, Letizia Moratti, wanted to remove it from school curricula.
Levi-Montalcini was the first woman president of the Italian Encyclopaedia and a member of several prestigious scientific societies including the Italian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences in the United States and Britain’s Royal Society.
Born into a wealthy Jewish intellectual family in northern Turin in 1909, Montalcini was the daughter of an engineer and an artist whom she described in her Nobel autobiography as "an exquisite human being."
She had a twin sister Paola, who died in 2000. Her brother Gino and older sister Anna have also died.
Overcoming her father's resistance to the idea of a professional career for a woman, Levi-Montalcini entered medical school in Turin aged 20. She then shunned marriage and motherhood to devote herself to a medical career.
But in 1936, the same year she earned a summa cum laude degree in medicine and surgery, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini decreed racial laws that barred Jews from pursuing academic and professional careers.
So instead of embarking on a specialisation in neurology and psychiatry, she set up a small laboratory in her bedroom, performing experiments on chick embryos.
The Allied bombing of Turin in 1941 forced the family to flee to the Piedmont countryside, where Levi-Montalcini rebuilt the lab. Two years later, with the German invasion, the family fled to Florence, where they lived underground until the end of the war.
She managed to work as a medical doctor for Allied forces, treating war refugees afflicted by deadly epidemics of infectious diseases such as typhus.
Finally, when the war in Italy ended in May 1945, Levi-Montalcini was able to resume her career.
Her work on chick embryos, published in Switzerland and Belgium, led to an invitation to a research position at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1947.
Although she initially planned to stay for a brief stint, she wound up staying in the U.S. for 30 years. It was there that she and Cohen studied mouse tumours implanted in chick embryos.
She heads the Levi-Montalcini Foundation, which she established to help African women. As U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation ambassador for many years and in many other public forums she has championed the fight against world hunger.
