Rita Levi-Montalcini speaking at the international NGF meeting 2008: Katzir Conference on Life and Death in the Nervous System, at Kfar Blum, IsraelFLICKR, AUDREY_SELRita Levi-Montalcini, a neurophysiologist who shared the Nobel Prize in 1986 for the discovery and isolation of nerve growth factor, died on Sunday (December 30). She was 103 years old.
Levi-Montalcini, in collaboration with colleague Stanley Cohen, developed an assay for purification of nerve growth factor (NGF) in the early 1950s, when methods and tools used to purify proteins were limited.
“It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of the having discovered the concept of growth factors, which are now known to regulate every aspect of embryonic development,” said David Kirk, a retired developmental geneticist who used to work in a lab near Levi-Montalcini’s lab at Washington University in St. Louis.
In the early 1940s, after Levi-Montalcini completed her medical degree at the University of Turin, the city was hit by World War II bombing. Levi-Montalcini, who was Jewish, fled to Florence, where she lived underground and served as a medical doctor for camps ...
