It’s 1939 and the Second World War is kicking off. As an Italian Jew, you have been denied the right to practice medicine by race laws. The training fIt’s 1939 and the Second World War is kicking off. As an Italian Jew, you have been denied the right to practice medicine by race laws. The training for which you sweated blood for years and which, as a woman, it was especially difficult to obtain, has been nullified. You have been denied the right to carry out any scientific research or any other professional activity; such activity on your part is now illegal. The news you hear is frankly terrifying. Your community has been specifically targeted for persecution. At first just the usual discrimination and vilification but now dispossession and even death. A reward of several thousand lira has been offered to anyone denouncing a Jew. What do you do?
If you are Rita Levi-Montalcini, you beg, borrow, steal or jury-rig some basic scientific equipment, put together a makeshift laboratory in your bedroom and carry on with your experiments. To obtain eggs (you are interested in the development of the chick embryonic nervous system) you cycle from farm to farm and claim that you need them to feed your children. You are aware that if caught by or reported to fascist authorities, your life may be on the line.
A distanza di tanti anni mi sono domandata come potessimo dedicarci con tanto entusiasmo all'analisi di questo piccolo problema di neuroembriologia, mentre le armate tedesche dilagavano in quasi tutta Europa disseminando la distruzione e la morte e minacciando la sopravvivenza stessa della civiltà occidentale. La risposta è nella disperata ed in parte inconscia volontà di ignorare ciò che accade, quando la piena consapevolezza ci priverebbe della possibilità di continuare a vivere.
Many years later I have asked myself how I could have devoted myself with such enthusiasm to the study of this obscure problem in neuroembryology, while the German armies poured through Europe like a deluge, spreading death and destruction and threatening the very survival of western civilisation. The answer lies in a desperate and partly unconscious will to ignore what was happening, when full consciousness of it would deprive me of the possibility of continuing to live.
These experiments, now considered seminal in developmental neurobiology, put Rita Levi-Montalcini on a scientific path that would eventually lead to the discovery of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) and the award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986.
Her autobiography traces her upbringing in Italy and her personal and professional life through the Second World War and afterwards, when she moved to the University of Washington to continue her work with Viktor Hamburger. Hamburger did not receive the Nobel Prize for work which he largely conceived and directed (Levi-Montalcini de-emphasises his role here); a fact which would later lead to some tension between the two.
Her title is a play on Yeats:
The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. When all that story’s finished, what’s the news? In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
Levi-Montalcini praises imperfection of the life and the work: Il fatto che l'attività svolta in modo così imperfetto sia stata e sia tuttora per me fonte inesauribile di gioia, mi fa ritenere che l'imperfezione nell'eseguire il compito che ci siamo prefissi o ci è stato assegnato, sia più consona alla natura umana così imperfetta che non la perfezione.
The fact that our work unfolds in such an imperfect way has been and remains for me a source of inexhaustible joy. It reminds me that imperfection in carrying out the tasks we have set ourselves or have been assigned, is more fitting to human nature – so imperfect – than perfection.
As she says in her prologue, the nervous systems of many invertebrates have not evolved for hundreds of millions of years, precisely due to their perfection.
Rita Levi-Montalcini died in 2012 aged 103. At that time she was still leading an active research laboratory. Who would have dared to stop her?...more
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