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| Rita Levi-Montalcini, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2025. She leans on the incubator built by her brother, and holds an egg with her prized binocular compound microscope in her WWII secret bedroom lab. |
This is a linocut print of Italian neurobiologist and Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909 – 2012) who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor. Hand-carved and hand-printed on delicate Japanese mulberry paper, each print is 11" x 14". She's long been on my radar as a possible subject for a portrait, being so well-known as a Nobel laureate and for many years, the oldest surviving laureate. Pictures abound online of her apparently living her best life, with a knowing smile and her signature swirled updo, often with a glass of wine
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| Rita Levi-Montalcini celebrating something |
in hand, well into her 90s and even past her 100th birthday. So I had imagined a fun portrait of this delightful, elegant and charming, active Jewish senior scientist, continuing to produce good work, mentor younger scientists, establishing (with her twin sister) a foundation to provide scholarships worldwide, especially for African women, acting as Italian senator for life and regularly pissing off right-wing politicians. But a client commissioned the portrait and specifically requested not her late life, nor the period around her Nobel win or research, but her wartime work, in her secret lab created in her bedroom. This seemed a real challenge as most photos I could find were in later decades, and the lab itself was not photographed. But I eventually found a couple of articles about her early career, which included a photo of her with her family in 1940, when they agreed she could make her lab, and
a great article by fellow scientist/printmaker
Bob Goldstein specifically about her wartime work. Bob kindly answered all my questions and even got me in contact with the archivists at Zeiss, so I could make sure I depicted her prized microscope accurately (if not the precise but unknown model, at least a plausible model which would have been available in Italy in 1940 and which would have served her goals) as well as an image of the type of observations she was making.
The youngest of four, Rita (along with her twin Paola) was born to an Italian Jewish family in Turin. Her mother Adele Montalcini was a talented painter and her father Adamo Levi was an electrical engineer and mathematician. She had planned to be a writer but the death of a beloved nanny to cancer inspired her to pursue medicine. Her father thought university would disrupt his daughters’ lives as wives and mothers but Rita knew she was not cut out for domestic life. Eventually he came to support her aspirations. As an undergraduate she was inspired by neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi (no relation) to study the nervous system and she stayed on after med school graduation in 1936 as his assistant. Her research and Levi’s, both, were cut short by the Italian dictator Mussolini’s 1938 Manifesto of Race and the introduction of racist laws baring Jews from academic and professional careers.
In 1939 she left Italy for Brussels, Belgium, where her older sister Nina and her family lived, and she was able to do research which involved using fertilized chicken eggs as a source of material. The research environment was challenging and she missed her family terribly. Soon, nowhere in Europe felt safe; she wrote "the whole world was in danger." She opted to return to Turin in December of 1939 to at least be close to her family, living with her mother, painter sister Paola and architect brother Gino in her large childhood home. They were not allowed to take part in the workforce and once Mussolini joined forces with Hitler and declared war on Britain and France, the industrial city of Turin became a target of nighttime aerial bombings. She was disappointed by the forced interruption in her research but that changed after running into a former colleague from the University of Turin, Rodolpho Amprino, by chance. While not Jewish, he too had left the university after the introduction of the racial laws. He was disgusted with the unjust treatment of Giuseppe Levi and the promotion of the new director of the Institute (not for his mediocre scientific sills, but for his closeness to the fascist regime). Amprino went to work in Chicago but returned to Italy in 1940. When he learned Levi-Montalcini was idle due to being barred from employment he told her "you don't lose courage in the face of the first difficulties." He advised her to set up a small laboratory, reminding her that the famed neuroanatomist and Nobel laureate Ramón y Cajal had managed to do fundamental work in the sleepy city of Valencia, so she could work at home. With her family’s support, Rita transformed her bedroom into a a secret research lab. In the summer of 1940, she read an article by US-based German scientist Victor Hamburger about the development of the nervous system and how nerve cells accurately connect muscles to the brain. Rita called this a “conversion” moment for her research goals. Hamburger described the surgery he did on chick embryos the size and shape of a typed letter ‘f’ with a glass needle, investigating what would occur if he removed the limb bud target of a nerve; would nerve cells still grow towards the limb? Their absence post-surgery lead him to conclude the nerves never formed if he removed the limb bud. Her brother built her an incubator for eggs so she could use egg embryos in her investigations. She had a heater for melting wax in which to embed the embryos, so she could make paper-thin slices she could observe with her microscope. In December 1940, she made a a daring train trip to Milan to purchase a binocular compound microscope from Zeiss. In arguably the most Italian anecdote ever about the history of science, police spotted her with her cake-sized box and demanded to see what was inside, suspecting she had a contraband panettone only available illegally under rationing. Luckily they were uninterested in her microscope and did not suspect that she needed it for her clandestine bedroom research lab, because her heritage barred her from an academic research job in fascist Italy. It became her most precious possession. She lugged it with her, along with glass slides, when she needed to use to the bomb shelter. She ventured out into the bombed out city of Turin to fetch fresh eggs regularly. She repeated Hamburger’s experiments using a sharpened sewing needle for surgery, and expanded on his research, investigating chick embryos not just before and after surgery, but daily, counting thousands of nerves for for 2 to 19 days after surgery. She captured the development through time, rather than a simple snapshot. In August 1941, her former mentor became her assistant, having fled Liege, Belgium where he had been working until the Germans arrived. Levi-Montacini saw something unexpected (contradicting Hamburger’s understanding); Hamburger had thought it was the muscles like those in the limb bulb that told nearby cells to become nerves whereas Levi-Montalcini saw that nerve cells formed regardless of the existence of a limb bulb but would die when deprived of a target. This was a fundamental observation; cell death plays a central role in how our nervous systems form. She published her results in Belgium and in a Vatican science journal in 1942, where Jewish scientists were still able to publish. My portrait represents Levi-Montalcini in her bedroom lab in 1940, leaning on her incubator, holding an egg, next to her precious microscope. Next to her is an image of nerves she photographed through this microscope.
Eventually the bombings and damage in Turin became too intense and the family, like most other residents fled the city for the country, making a home in Asti. During occupation she was in continuous contact with the partisan leaders of the Action Party (Partito d'Azione) and after Florence was liberated she volunteered her medical expertise for the Allied Health Service, treating the injured and refugees with typhoid and other diseases.
Hamburger read her article and invited her to the US after the war, to continue her research and collaborate as a research associate at Washington University in St Louis, where she ended up working for 30 years. Her research established fundamental role that cell death plays in the formation of nervous systems. Her ongoing investigation into how target tissues like muscles communicate with nerve cells so only those that find targets survive, ultimately led to her co-discovery with Stanley Cohen of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) in 1952. NGF is a molecule taken up by nerves from their targets and it allows them to survive. She transferred bits of tumours to chick embryos and saw a halo of nerves grow around it "like rivulets of water flowing steadily over a bed of stones," unlike anything she had seen before. She hypothesized that the tumour itself was releasing a substance that was stimulating the growth of nerves; this was verified with Stanley Cohen's help. Foundational to neurobiology, this research was important to our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases. She became a full professor in 1958 and, missing Italy, opened a second laboratory in Rome in 1962, dividing her time between Rome and St. Louis.
She was director of the Research Center of Neurobiology of the CNR (Rome), from 1961 to 1969 and of the Laboratory of Cellular Biology from 1969 to 1978. She was appointed director of the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research in Rome in 1977 and continued as a guest professor after her "retirement" in 1979. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1986. She wrote several books including her 1988 biography 'In Praise of Imperfection.' During the 1990s, she was amongst the first scientists to point out the importance of the mast cell in human pathology and she identified the endogenous compound palmitoylethanolamide as an important modulator of this cell. On 1 August 2001, she was appointed as Senator for Life by the President of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. She went on to found the European Brain Research Institute in 2002, and served as its president. She was active well into her later life, even attending the opening of the senate at age 97 and attending Pope Benoît XVI 's visit to Rome's main synagogue at age 100. She died in her home in Rome on 30 December 2012 at the age of 103 after many years as the longest living Nobel laureate.
References
Goldstein, Bob. A Lab of Her Own, Nautilus magazine, December 1, 2021.
Piccolino, Marco. Rita Levi-Montalcini's first intellectual emigration and her research in her laboratory "à la Robinson Crusoe": The Letters from Brussels and a "Whiggish" recollection. Multidisciplinary Research in Neurosciences. Conf. Cephalal. et Neurol. 2021; Vol. 31. N. 2:e2021016.
Rita Levi-Montalcini (b. 1909), Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis Missouri, 2007.
Rita Levi-Montalcini, Wikipedia, accessed May, 2025.
RITA LEVI-MONTALCINI. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2025. Thursday 12 June 2025.
Stafford, Ned. Rita Levi-Montalcini, February 2013. BMJ 2013; 346 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f804 (Published 11 February 2013)
