Rita Levi-Montalcini

Category	Research
Also known as	Levi-Montalcini, NGF co-discoverer
Last updated	2026-04-14
Reading time	3 min read
Tags	scientistngfneurobiologynobel-prizeitaly

Overview

Rita Levi-Montalcini (April 22, 1909 – December 30, 2012) was an Italian neurobiologist whose discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF) in the 1950s opened the entire field of trophic factors — peptides and proteins that regulate the survival and growth of specific neuronal populations. For this work, she shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Stanley Cohen.

Her career spanned nearly a century and was shaped by extraordinary circumstances. Born to a Jewish family in Turin, she was trained in medicine but was barred from academic positions after Italy's 1938 racial laws excluded Jews from professional life. She set up a home laboratory with improvised equipment and studied the development of chicken embryos under the eye of a converted bedroom. When the Germans occupied northern Italy, she went into hiding with her family in Florence.

After the war, Levi-Montalcini resumed her academic career and was invited by Viktor Hamburger to Washington University in St. Louis, where she would work for more than 30 years. There, her observation that implanted mouse sarcoma tumors caused dramatic overgrowth of sympathetic and sensory ganglia led, with her collaborator Stanley Cohen, to the identification and purification of NGF.

Background

Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin. She studied medicine at the University of Turin under Giuseppe Levi (no relation), alongside future Nobel laureates Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco. Her home-laboratory work during the war anticipated many of the experimental techniques she would later use at Washington University.

After the Nobel Prize, she continued to be active in research and in public life, serving as senator for life in the Italian Senate from 2001 until her death in 2012 at age 103. She founded institutes supporting neurobiological research and education across Italy and, through her philanthropic work, sought to expand opportunities for young scientists in Africa.

Key Contributions

Discovery of NGF activity in mouse sarcoma-implanted chick embryos.
Identification of NGF in snake venom and male mouse salivary glands — tissues that proved unusually rich in the factor, making purification feasible.
Foundational work on sympathetic and sensory neuronal development and the concept of trophic dependence.
Mentorship of a generation of Italian neuroscientists.

Timeline

1909: Born in Turin.
1936: Graduates in medicine.
1938: Italian racial laws exclude her from academic work.
1940s: Home-laboratory research on chick embryo development.
1947: Invited to Washington University by Viktor Hamburger.
1952: First observations of tumor-induced nerve growth.
1954: With Stanley Cohen, establishes NGF as a defined protein factor.
1986: Nobel Prize awarded.
2001: Appointed senator for life in Italy.
2012: Dies in Rome at age 103.

Modern Relevance

The NGF discovery launched a field that now includes BDNF, NT-3, NT-4, GDNF, and other neurotrophins, all essential to developmental neuroscience and increasingly important in neurodegenerative disease research. NGF-targeted therapies for chronic pain (anti-NGF antibodies such as tanezumab, fasinumab) have emerged from the insight that NGF also sensitizes sensory neurons in adult tissues.

Levi-Montalcini's life is also widely celebrated for its demonstration of scientific persistence under adverse conditions. Her autobiography In Praise of Imperfection is a classic of scientific memoir. For related content, see stanley-cohen and peptides-in-neuroscience.