Rita Levi-Montalcini: In Memoriam

Figure 1. Rita Levi-Montalcini, born April 22, 1909; died December, 30, 2012 On January 2, 2013, Rita Levi-Montalcini was laid to rest at the Cimitero Monumentale in Turin, Italy, the city where she was born more than 103 years ago and where she started her medical and scientific career. Her death was reported by all major news media (BBC News, The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and The Washington Post), and her passing was recognized by the Vatican, the Italian President of the Republic, the Italian Prime Minister, and the Mayor of Rome. Rita Levi-Montalcini lay in state in the Palazzo Madama Senate building in Rome, where thousands of citizens paid a final tribute. There have been few scientists who have been accorded so much honor and acclaim (Figure 1). Much has been written about Rita’s scientific life and accomplishments, including her early training as a medical student at the University of Turin and her close association with fellow students Renato Dulbecco and Salvador Luria; her makeshift laboratory in her bedroom during World War II; the 30 years of collaboration with Viktor Hamburger at Washington University; the in vitro assay for nerve growth factor (NGF) she developed from a visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1952; the serendipitous finding of NGF in snake venom with Stanley Cohen, which led to its purification and characterization as a protein; and her leadership roles as founder and president of the European Brain Research Institute (EBRI) and as a member of the Italian Senate. Here we wish to shed light on unique aspects of her scientific and humanitarian life that have not received much attention. Rita Levi-Montalcini represents a remarkable breed of scientist who is rarely encountered today. She not only had to endure obstacles due to sexism and religious discrimination, but was also affected by totalitarism, politics, and war. She often noted that she viewed herself as an artist more than as a scientist. Her decision in the 1930s to study the nervous system was based upon her fascination with its beauty and complexity. During experiments carried out from 1940 to 1960, her scientific hypotheses did not require highly sophisticated techniques. Indeed, Rita’s and Stanley Cohen’s use of NGF antibodies in 1960 gave rise to identical results as did NGF knockout mice generated more than 40 years later. Interestingly, most of her experiments did not contain statistical data. Her demonstration of the diffusible nature of the growth-promoting activity by mouse sarcoma tumors implanted in the chorioallantoic membrane, the halo effect of NGF, and the effects of immunosympathectomy were so pronounced that they did not require any statistics. Rita did not like results based on a statistical analysis and, as she used to say, she preferred ‘‘experiments with a yes or no answer.’’ In the cell culture room in Rita’s Center of Neurobiology in Rome, there was a plaque with a saying attributed to Albert Einstein: ‘‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’’ Indeed, her scientific attitude was, as she used to say, a product more of intuition and imagination than of deep complex reasoning. She also mentioned that the best ideas came