Today, the day after Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Jewish-Italian scientist turns 100. Long after the Nazi and fascist fools of WW II have died ignoble deaths and are remembered, if at all, as brutal losers, this woman celebrates her 100th birthday honored and proud.

Benito Mussolini is spinning in his grave, and presumably his fool of a granddaughter is none too happy either.

I picked this up from BBC News. Details from her autobiography on Nobelprize.org.

Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin in 1909. She graduated from medical school with a summa cum laude degree in Medicine and Surgery in 1936, no easy feat for a woman in those days. But even harder for a Jew. In 1936 Mussolini issued the "Manifesto per la Difesa della Razza" several laws barring academic and professional careers to non-Aryan Italian citizens. Levi-Montalcini was forced out of her job...so, she set up her own lab in her own bedroom and kept on working there. As a scientist myself all I can say is I don't think I'd have the determination and organizational skills to set up a lab in my own home to do the kinds of experiments she did! From her autobiography on Nobelprize.org:

After a short period spent in Brussels as a guest of a neurological institute, I returned to Turin on the verge of the invasion of Belgium by the German army, Spring 1940, to join my family. 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...

The war in Italy ended in May 1945. I returned with my family to Turin where I resumed my academic positions at the University. In the Fall of 1947, an invitation from Professor Viktor Hamburger to join him and repeat the experiments which we had performed many years earlier in the chick embryo, was to change the course of my life.

Although I had planned to remain in St. Louis for only ten to twelve months, the excellent results of our research made it imperative for me to postpone my return to Italy. In 1956 I was offered the position of Associate Professor and in 1958 that of Full Professor, a position which I held until retirement in 1977. In 1962 I established a research unit in Rome, dividing my time between this city and St. Louis. From 1969 to 1978 I also held the position of Director of the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research, in Rome. Upon retirement in 1979, I became Guest Professor of this same institute.

Professor Levi-Montalcini won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1986. From the Press release from the Nobel committee:

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded for discoveries which are of fundamental importance for our understanding of the mechanisms which regulate cell and organ growth. The pattern of cellular growth has long been known, but it is the Italian developmental biologist Rita Levi-Montalcini and the American biochemist Stanley Cohen with their discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF) and epidermal growth factor (EGF), respectively, who could show how the growth and differentiation of a cell is regulated. NGF and EGF were the first of many growth-regulating signal substances to be discovered and characterized.

The discovery of NGF and EGF has opened new fields of widespread importance to basic science. As a direct consequence we may increase our understanding of many disease states such as developmental malformations, degenerative changes in senile dementia, delayed wound healing and tumour diseases. The characterization of these growth factors is therefore expected, in the near future, to result in the development of new therapeutic agents and improved treatment in various clinical diseases....

Figure 1. The classical biological assay for the measurement of NGF which was developed by Rita Levi-Montalcini. Sensory ganglion dissected from chick embryo is cultured in the presence of extract to be measured. Nerve fibre outgrowth from the chick ganglion is determined after 24 hours. The lowest concentration of the extract which causes a halo of nerve fibre outgrowth (right hand side figure) contains 1 biological unit of NGF. This is equivalent to a concentration of approximately 10 nanograms NGF/ml culture medium (10 ng=1/100,000 of 1 milligram). The left hand side ganglion has been incubated without NGF being present in the medium and is in the process of dying.
The figure has been published in Scientific American 1979, 240, p. 48.

You can see an interview with Rita Levi-Montalcini from 2008 conducted by the Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org HERE.

Picking up again from the BBC News article:

In 2004, the revered scientist intervened to defend the teaching of evolution in Italian schools when the then education minister wanted to remove it from school curricula.

Rita Levi-Montalcini also set up a foundation for African women who in her words have been "humiliated, physically and psychologically".

"The African woman is no different from the African man. The only difference is that one is privileged within the society, and the other downtrodden", she said.

Amazing person, and one who seems to take up many of the same fights I like to take up. Happy Birthday professor!