Rita Levi-Montalcini - neurobiologist

Scientist overcame many obstacles to win Nobel Prize

Even in her late 90s, Levi-Montalcini was still
making appearances as a guest speaker

Rita Levi-Montalcini, a neurobiologist whose important discovery about nerve growth helped to advance medical knowledge, was born on this day in 1909 in Turin.

Levi-Montalcini was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.  She lived until the age of 103, having become the first Nobel laureate to reach the age of 100.

Despite Mussolini’s racial laws preventing Levi-Montalcini from having an academic or professional career in Italy, she carried out research in her bedroom at home that led to her discovering nerve growth factor. 

This discovery paved the way for future research in neurobiology, which demonstrated that the nervous, immune, and endocrine systems are linked, and had profound implications for understanding neurodegenerative diseases.

Levi-Montalcini was born to Italian Jewish parents and had a twin sister, Paola. They were the youngest of four children.

She once considered becoming a writer. After seeing a close family friend die of stomach cancer, however, she decided to go to the medical school of Turin University instead, where she first became interested in the nervous system.

After graduating in medicine and surgery with the highest distinction in 1936, Levi-Montalcini stayed on at the university as an assistant, until her career was ended by Mussolini’s 1938 Manifesto of Race, which banned Jews from holding professional positions.

Determined to continue her work, even after Italy entered World War Two, she set up a laboratory in her bedroom, where she studied the growth of nerve fibres in chicken embryos.  

When Germany invaded Italy in 1943, her family fled to Florence, where they survived the Holocaust by using false identities and were protected by non-Jewish friends.

Levi-Montalcini pictured in 1930, when
she enrolled at the University of Turin

After the liberation of Florence, Levi-Montalcini volunteered for the Allied Health Service and helped to provide critical care for people injured during the war.

When the war was over, Levi-Montalcini published the results of her home laboratory experiments. As a result, she was offered a research position at Washington School of Medicine, a post she was to hold for the next 30 years, and it was there she made her vital discovery about nerve growth factor. 

Eventually she established a second laboratory in Rome, and was then able to divide her time between working in Italy and the United States.

In 1986  Levi-Montalcini earned her Nobel prize, which she shared with the American biochemist Stanley Cohen, for their research into nerve growth factor.

After she became director of neurobiology of the National Research Council of Italy, she was one of the first scientists to point out the importance of the mast cell in human pathology.

The president of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, made her a senator for life in 2001. In 2006, at the age of 97, she attended the opening ceremony of the Senate, at which the upper house of the Italian parliament was to elect its president. She declared her support for the centre-left candidate, Franco Marini, who defeated former prime minister Giulio Andreotti in the vote.

That year she held the deciding vote in the Italian parliament in a budget dispute and threatened to withdraw her support for the government unless they reversed their decision to cut science funding. The funding was put back in and the budget passed, despite the opposition’s attempts to silence her by mocking her age.

In 2009, a party was given at Rome’s Palazzo Senatorio - also known as City Hall - in Piazza del Campidoglio to honour her achievement of becoming the first Nobel laureate to reach the age of 100.

During her life, Rita Levi-Montalcini had faced many obstacles but had been motivated to succeed anyway. She once said: ‘If I had not been discriminated against, or had not suffered persecution, I would never have received the Nobel Prize.’

Her twin sister, Paola, who had been a popular artist in Italy, died at the age of 91. Rita Levi-Montalcini died at her home in Rome at the age of 103 and she was later buried in the grave with her twin sister at the Monumental Cemetery in Turin.

One of the entrances to Turin's huge Monumental
Cemetery, reputed to contain 400,000 graves

Travel tip:

The Monumental Cemetery of Turin - previously known as the General Cemetery  - is the largest cemetery in the city and one of the biggest in Italy, said to be the last resting place of more than 400,000 people in a 60-hectare site.  Located in the northeast of Turin’s historic centre, it contains numerous historic tombs and 12km (7 miles) of porticoes, adorned with sculptures of artistic value. Opened in 1829 to replace the cemeteries of San Lazzaro and San Pietro in Vincoli, it was built thanks to the philanthropist Marquis Carlo Tancredi Falletti di Barolo. The cemetery has become something of a tourist attraction because of the number of famous Italians whose graves lie within it. These include the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and several other writers, including  Edmondo De Amicis, Mario Soldati and Carolina Invernizio. Several scientists are buried there in addition to Levi-Montalcini, including Cesare Lombroso and Galileo Ferraris. Other notable graves include those of 19th century politician Massimo d’Azeglio, the operatic tenor Francesco Tamagno, actor and singer Fred Buscaglione, food canning pioneer Francesco Cirio, racing driver Nino Farina, the car designer Battista Pininfarina, football coach Nils Liedholm and some members of the Grand Torino football team killed in the Superga disaster of 1949. 

Stay in Turin with Expedia

Piazza del Campidoglio, designed by Michelangelo,
was commissioned by Pope Paul III

Travel tip:

The building colloquially known as Rome’s City Hall, the Palazzo Senatorio, is one of three main buildings grouped around Piazza del Campidoglio, a beautiful public square built in the 16th century to a design by Michelangelo. The others are the Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Nuovo, which form the Capitoline Museums.  Situated at the top of the Capitoline Hill, overlooking the Roman Forum, it was commissioned by Pope Paul III, who wanted a symbol of his 'new' Rome to impress the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who was expected to visit Rome in 1538. Michelangelo’s plans involved a new facade for the Palazzo Senatorio, including a double staircase, and a new facade for the Palazzo dei Conservatori. The Palazzo Nuovo, as the name suggests, was a brand new building, designed to mirror the Palazzo dei Conservatori. The striking centrepiece of the square, for which Michelangelo produced an oval design, included a complex spiralling pavement with a twelve-pointed star at its centre. Palazzo Senatorio today houses the Rome Mayor’s office and has been the seat of the City Council since 1870. It was the home of the Roman Senate - not to be confused with the Senate of Ancient Rome - from the 12th century.

Find accommodation in Rome with Hotels.com

More reading:

Novelist Grazia Deledda, Italy’s first female Nobel laureate

The Garibaldi supporter who won a Nobel Peace prize

How a civil engineer won a Nobel prize writing poetry in spare time

Also on this day:

1891: The birth of auto engine designer Vittorio Jano

1935: The birth of opera singer Fiorenza Cossotto

2006: The death of actress Alida Valli

Home

Renato Dulbecco - Nobel Prize-winning physiologist

Research led to major breakthrough in knowledge of cancer

Renato Dulbecco emigrated to the United States
1946 after studying at the University of Turin

Renato Dulbecco, a physiologist who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his role in drawing a link between genetic mutations and cancer, was born on this day in 1914 in Catanzaro in Calabria.

Through a series of experiments that began in the late 1950s after he had emigrated to the United States, Dulbecco and two colleagues showed that certain viruses could insert their own genes into infected cells and trigger uncontrolled cell growth, a hallmark of cancer.

Their findings transformed the course of cancer research, laying the groundwork for the linking of several viruses to human cancers, including the human papilloma virus, which is responsible for most cervical cancers.

The discovery also provided the first tangible evidence that cancer was caused by genetic mutations, a breakthrough that changed the way scientists thought about cancer and the effects of carcinogens such as tobacco smoke.

Dulbecco, who shared the Nobel Prize with California Institute of Technology (Caltech) colleagues Howard Temin and David Baltimore, then examined how viruses use DNA to store their genetic information and, in his studies of breast cancer, pioneered a technique for identifying cancer cells by the proteins present on their surface.

Dulbecco found that viruses such as the human
papilloma virus could cause cell mutations

His proposal in 1986 to catalogue all human genes can be seen as the beginnings of the Human Genome Project, which was completed in 2003.

The son of a civil engineer, Dulbecco grew up in Liguria after his family moved from Catanzaro to the coastal city of Imperia. He graduated from high school at 16 and went on to the University of Turin, receiving his medical degree in 1936. He became friends there with two other future Nobel prizewinners, Rita Levi-Montalcini and Salvador Luria, who were fellow students.

Immediately upon graduating, he was required to do two years’ military service. He was discharged in 1938 but soon afterwards called up again as Italy entered the Second World War, joining the Italian Army as a medical officer.

His role eventually took him to the Russian front, where he suffered an injury to his shoulder that meant he was sent back to Italy to recuperate. Disillusioned with Mussolini and horrified at learning of the fate of Jews under Hitler, he decided not to return to the Army, joining the resistance instead. He stationed himself in a remote village outside Turin, tending to injured partisans.

After the war, he was briefly involved with politics, firstly on the Committee for National Liberation in Turin and then on the city council, but soon returned to Turin University to study physics and conduct biological research.

Dulbecco's fellow Turin University graduate
Salvador Duria also moved to America

With the encouragement of Levi-Montalcini, who would win a Nobel Prize in 1986 for her work in neurobiology, in 1946, he moved to United States, rejoining Luria, who shared a Nobel in 1969 for discoveries about the genetics of bacteria, at Indiana University, where they studied viruses. In the summer of 1949 he moved to Caltech, where he began his work on animal oncoviruses.

Dulbecco worked with Dr. Marguerite Vogt on a method of determining the amount of polio virus present in cell culture, a step that was vital in the development of polio vaccine, before becoming intrigued by a thesis written by Howard Temin on the connection between viruses and cancer.

He left Caltech in 1962 to move to the Salk Institute, a polio research facility in San Diego, and then in 1972 to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) in London.

There was a mixed reaction in Italy when it was learned that ‘their’ Nobel Prize winner had become an American citizen. In fact, his Italian citizenship was revoked, although when he moved back to Italy in 1993 to spend four years as president of the Institute of Biomedical Technologies at National Council of Research in Milan he was made an honorary citizen.

Married twice, with three children, Dulbecco died in La Jolla, California, in 2012, three days before what would have been his 98th birthday.

From its elevated position, Catanzaro has views towards
the Ionian Sea and the resort of Catanzaro Lido

Travel tip:

Occupying a position 300m (980ft) above the Gulf of Squillace, Catanzaro is known as the City of the Two Seas because, from some vantage points, it is possible to see the Tyrrhenian Sea to the north of the long peninsula occupied by Calabria as well as the Ionian Sea to the south.  The historic centre, which sits at the highest point of the city, includes a 16th century cathedral built on the site of a 12th century Norman cathedral which, despite being virtually destroyed by bombing in 1943, has been impressively restored.  The city is about 15km (9 miles) from Catanzaro Lido, which has a long white beach typical of the Gulf of Squillace.

Hotels in Catanzaro by Booking.com

The waterfront of the Ligurian port city of Imperia, with
the Basilica of San Maurizio on top of the hill

Travel tip:

The beautiful city of Imperia, on Liguria's Riviera Poniente about 120km (75 miles) west of Genoa and 60km (37 miles) from the border with France, came into being in 1923 when the neighbouring ports of Porto Maurizio and Oneglia, either side of the Impero river, were merged along with several surrounding villages to form one conurbation.  Oneglia, once the property of the Doria family in the 13th century, has become well known for cultivating flowers and olives. Porto Maurizio, originally a Roman settlement called Portus Maurici, has a classical cathedral dedicated to San Maurizio, which was built by Gaetano Cantoni and completed in the early 19th century.

Stay in Imperia with Booking.com


More reading:

How Salvador Luria reached the United States after fleeing Paris on a bicycle

Grazia Deledda - the first Italian woman to win a Nobel Prize

The first physiologist to explain human movement

Also on this day:

1876: The birth of opera singer and director Giovanni Zenatello

1905: The birth of industrialist Enrico Piaggio

1921: The birth of actress Giulietta Masina

1990: The death of Autogrill pioneer Mario Pavesi

(Picture credits: Catanzaro view by Salvatore Migliari; Imperia waterfront by BMK)

Home

Grazia Deledda - Nobel Prize winner

First Italian woman to be honoured

Grazia Deledda was the first Italian
woman to win a Nobel Prize

The novelist Grazia Deledda, who was the first of only two Italian women to be made a Nobel laureate when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, was born on this day in 1871 in the city of Nuoro in Sardinia.

A prolific writer from the age of 13, she published around 50 novels or story collections over the course of her career, most of them drawing on her own experience of life in the rugged Sardinian countryside.

The Nobel prize was awarded "for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general."

Deledda’s success came at the 11th time of asking, having been first nominated in 1913. The successful nomination came from Henrik Schuck, a literature historian at the Swedish Academy.

Born into a middle-class family - her father, Giovanni, was in her own words a “well-to-do landowner” - Deledda drew inspiration for her characters from the stream of friends and business acquaintances her father insisted must stay at their home whenever they were in Nuoro.

The cover of an early edition of Elias
Portolú, Deledda's first big success

She was not allowed to attend school beyond the age of 11 apart from private tuition in Italian, which was not at the time the first language of many Sardinians, who tended to converse in their own dialect, sardo logudorese. Beyond that, she continued her education by reading as much quality literature as she could get hold of.

Her parents did not encourage her writing but she persevered and, on the advice of her English teacher, submitted a story to a magazine when she was 13 and was delighted when they decided to publish it.

Even at that early stage in her career, her stories tended to be starkly realistic in their reflection of the hard life many Sardinians endured at the time and she often used the sometimes brutally challenging landscape of the island as a metaphor for the difficulties in her characters’ lives.

Yet she would more often blame societal factors and flawed morals for the difficult circumstances in which her characters found themselves, which reflected her own optimistic view of human nature.

However, she was chastised by her father for the way her stories questioned the patriarchal structure of Sardinian society and they were not received well generally in Nuoro, where some people expressed their displeasure by burning copies of the magazine that published her work.

There is a commemorative bust of
Grazia Deledda on Pincio hill in Rome

Deledda completed her first novel, Fior di Sardegna (Flower of Sardinia) in 1892, when she was not quite 21. She sent to a publisher in Rome, who accepted. Again it was shunned in Nuoro, but it was successful enough elsewhere for her to set about writing more and she submitted at least one every year, sometimes using a pseudonym.

In 1900, she visited Cagliari, the Sardinian capital on a rare holiday. She had never been far from Nuoro before but it proved a momentous occasion. She met Palmiro Madesani, a civil servant who would become her husband.  After they were married, they moved to Rome, where Deledda would live for the remainder of her life.

It was there that she tasted her first real success with Elias Portolú (1903), a novel that was published in Italian first but which was translated into French and subsequently all the major European languages, bringing her international recognition for the first time.

The period between 1903 and 1920 was her most productive phase for her, in which she wrote some of her best work. Her 1904 novel Cenere (Ashes) was turned into a film starring the celebrated actress Eleonora Duse.

Deledda preferred a quiet life with her family to any
celebrity despite the attention the prize brought her

Life in Sardinia continued to be her favourite theme. Nostalgie (Nostalgia, 1905), I giuochi della vita (The Gambles of Life, 1905), L’ombra del passato (Shadow of the Past, 1907) and L’edera (The Ivy, 1908) brought her more success.

This brought her a comfortable living and she was happy in Rome, even if she preferred a quiet life at home to celebrity. If she was bitter at the way her family had reacted to her writing, she did not let it stand in the way of her humanity and she supported her brothers, Andrea and Santus, after her father died.

Deledda died in Rome in 1936 at the age of just 64, having suffered with breast cancer. Her last years were painful but she never lost her optimistic view of life, which she believed was beautiful and serene and gave her the strength to overcome physical and spiritual hardships. Her later works reflected her strong religious faith.

Italy's only other female Nobel Prize-winner is Rita Levi-Montalcini, who won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

The house in Nuoro where the novelist
was born is now a museum

Travel tip:

Deledda's birthplace and childhood home in Nuoro has been preserved as a museum in her honour. Called the Museo Deleddiano, it consists of 10 rooms where the stages of the writer's life are reconstructed.  The building is located in Santu Pedru, one of the city's oldest quarters. The house was sold in 1913 but remains mostly unaltered. It was acquired by the Municipality of Nuoro in 1968 and, thanks to the generosity of the Madesani-Deledda family,  a large number of manuscripts, photographs, documents and personal belongings of the novelist are on display.  The museum, in Via Grazia Deledda, is open from 10am to 1pm and from 3pm to 7pm (8pm in summer), every day except Mondays.

Nuoro is situated in a ruggedly mountainous area

Travel tip:

Nuoro, situated on the slopes of the Monte Ortobene in central eastern Sardinia, has grown to be the sixth largest city in Sardinia with a population of more than 36,000.  The birthplace of several renowned artists, including the poet Sebastiano Satta, the novelist Salvatore Satta - a cousin - the architect and car designer Flavio Manzoni and the award-winning sculptor Francesco Ciusa, it is considered an important cultural centre.  It is also home of one of reputedly the world’s rarest pasta - su filindeu, which in the Sardinian language means "the threads of God" - which is made exclusively by the women of a single family to a recipe passed down through generations.

More reading:

Giosuè Carducci - the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature

How Nobel Prize-winner Dario Fo put the spotlight on corruption

The groundbreaking talent of actress Eleonora Duse

Also on this day:

1966: The birth of rapper Jovanotti

1979: The death on Capri of actress and singer Gracie Fields 


Home