See on Scoop.it - Good Things From Italy - Le Cose Buone d’Italia
ROME -March is Women’s History Month, and our choice to celebrate is an exceptional Italian woman who had deep ties with the United States and international influence. Neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1986 with Stanley Cohen for discovery of the nerve growth factor (NGF), seen in the rapid growth of cancer cells.Her work has also contributed to studies of senile dementia. Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin, Italy, in 1909, one of four children. Her family life was happy, and she described them all as particularly devoted to each other. Her father was an electrical engineer cum mathematician and her mother a talented amateur artist; her twin sister Paola, with whom she remained close throughout her life, was a successful artist in Italy. It was a problem that her father, however loving, did not want his daughters’ studies to interfere with their presumed future life as wife and mother. But Levi-Montalcini persisted and eventually persuaded him that this would not be her future course. She was therefore allowed to resume her studies and graduated from high school, albeit belatedly, at age twenty. She continued with university studies in Turin and was graduated from medical school with a summa cum laude degree in surgery in 1936.
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