Jewish Lives: Rita Levi-Montalcini

Ruby Rohrlich

"HOW COULD YOU GO BACK TO A COUNTRY THAT persecuted you, that took away your citizenship, your profession, where you had to live underground to survive?" She was watering her plants, dozens of coral and crimson plants, in the living-room of the apartment she shares with her sister Paola. She put the watering-can on a table beside the black corduroy couch on which I was sitting. But she didn't answer. She only smiled a little as she went to the book-shelves in the hall, and returned with an armful of books that she placed next to the watering-can. It took me a long time to find the answer to my question, a time I spent reading quantities of books and papers, interviewing her colleagues, friends and relatives, going back and forth between the United States and Italy. The answer has to do with the singular nature of Italian culture and Jewish assimilation to this culture, as well as to the variable relationships between women and men in both Italy and the United States.

Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in 1909, and has just turned 90. Her carriage is erect, she is enviably slim, her hands don't tremble, she doesn't wear glasses. The wrinkles on her face she attributes to inordinate sunning at a much younger age. Her thick, gray hair is styled smartly and simply, and so are her clothes. Her eyes are greenish-gray, a light color unexpectedly frequent in dark-haired Italians. In 1986, she and her American colleague, Stan Cohen, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology for the discovery of the Nerve Growth Factor (NGF).

I am looking at two pictures, juxtaposed, that appeared in "F," the Saturday magazine supplement of the Corriere della Sera, dated February 9, 1991, in a feature on famous Italian women, "As They Were ... and As They Are." One picture shows the Rita of five years ago, her right hand supporting her face, her mouth slightly widened by the hint of a smile. The other picture is a copy of a black-and-white photograph of a small, seated child, her delicately-embroidered white dress contrasting with the dark hair curling around a face also supported by the right hand. There is no hint of a smile on her full mouth, her eyes are not joyful. Are they hurt, sad?

Here is the Rita of eighty years ago, who avoided physical contact with adults, especially her father. She would turn her face away when he bent to kiss her. Nor was he taken in by her excuse that his mustache prickled. In his turn, he played only with Paola, creating a division between the twins in which Rita told Paola everything, and Paola told Rita nothing. The wounds that Rita and her father inflicted on each other still festered at his death.

According to her autobiography, In Praise of Imperfection, her ancestors were Sephardic on both sides and traced their Italian roots back to the Roman Empire. [1] Considering that Italian Jews lost their rights as citizens in 1938, it is difficult to remember that at that time Jews had been living in Italy for well over two millennia. Near the end of the nineteenth century the grandparents moved from the substantial towns of Asti and Casale Monferrato in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, to Turin, the capitol, which had became a more hospitable city for Jews. Adele Montalcini met Adamo Levi in 1901; they married soon after, and had four children: Gino, Nina, Rita, and Paola.

Levi is an ancient name. With his two wives, Leah and Rachel, and two concubines, Jacob had twelve sons, each son biblically viewed as the founder of one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, Levi being the third son. In the Revelation at Sinai the tribe of Levi, the Levites, received no land but were given a sacrosanct function: they were made responsible for assisting the priests in the Temple rituals. The patronymic "Levi," borne by many illustrious men and women, is frequently encountered in Jewish-Italian history. "Montalcini" is probably the area in Italy where Rita's maternal ancestors settled and whose name they adopted;Jews frequently took the names of Italian localities.

Rita combined the two names when she began to work in the United States. She rejected advice from colleagues to drop "Levi" and use only "Montalcini," a Jewish name in Italy but not in the United States. When the Germans occupied Italy during World War II, the Levis went underground and took an Italian name, to shield themselves, as well as the Catholic woman who sheltered them at great risk. The advice to change her name was Rita's early encounter with the attempt by American Jews to circumvent antisemitism by concealing a name that revealed their heritage, but she was determined never to change her name again. In fact, I suspect she uses the names of both mother and father because she is a feminist. Her hyphenated name, and the elegant gold jewelry she wore, that Italian women seem to favor, led an ethnocentric American psychologist, who encountered Rita at scientific meetings, to assume she was supported by a wealthy Italian husband. Nothing could be further from the facts of her life.

As a child Rita was consumed by anxieties arising mainly from two sources: her father's unpredictable wrath, and the nightmares induced by his stories about the precarious situation of Jews under the Italian Inquisition, and during the pogroms in Eastern Europe. This fearful little girl, utterly lacking in self-confidence, needed to have Paola walk with her at dusk to their bedroom, through the long, shadowy hall where dark and evil spirits lurked. Secure in the love of her father, Paola did not imagine malevolent beings lying in wait. She was not frightened by "the severity and the piercing quality of Adamo's gaze, the slight flaring of the nostrils preceding his brief but violent outbursts of anger, the imperious voice." [2] This anger, permitted expression by his status of male head of household, seemed additionally to have been an innate characteristic. Even as a boy Adamo would turn his wrath on whichever of his 17 siblings he thought was behaving badly; in the carefree environment of his large family t his earned him the sobriquet "Damino the Terrible." [3] But Rita trembled with fear when she saw its portents and, extending this fear to all adults, fled from them.

Socialized by the Italian and Jewish cultural values in their milieu- Victorian, Italian, Jewish--Adamo was the patriarch, and Adele, not only his wife but nine years his junior, accepted his authority. The markedly different and unequal roles played by the mother and father permeated the household, as Rita points out in her interview in Omni: "The ideal for my father was my mother: exceedingly beautiful, intelligent, refined, but submissive to him, accepting of being number two. He made every decision." [4] The disrespect to Adele that this implies, however it was cloaked, must have been sensed by Rita. But it was undoubtedly also Adamo's temperament that impelled him to make all the decisions in the household, particularly about the rearing of the children, even to the kind of hats worn by "the little girls," as he called the twins. [5] Like the control he tried to exercise over his family of origin, Rita ruefully notes the extent of his domination over his family: "An endless number of [ldots] episodes du ring our pre-school and first school years concerning Paola and myself, as well as our brother and sister, convinced me that, in spite of the fact we only saw him at lunch and dinner and that he was often away in Ban for weeks on end, managing the big plant he had built, it was he who controlled our lives, even in small details." [6]

Nevertheless, harmony reigned in this household. "I was brought up" said Rita, "in an environment that, though not permissive, was brimming with affection, and never troubled by disagreements between my mother and father." [7] She was also painfully aware of Adele's subordination, the price she paid to keep the peace. That she could not count on her mother to fend off the father's rages, was not this one source of her unease?

Another side of Adamo's temperament was exuberantly Italian. He loved Italian opera, knew all the popular arias, and would sometimes sing them in a melodious baritone that filled the whole apartment during the lengthy shaving process in the morning. "His singing," wrote Rita, "made us happy; it was a sign he was in high spirits." [8] Obviously the family's psychological well-being depended to a considerable extent on Adamo's variable disposition. When Rita lived in St. Louis, Missouri, she played the records of these operas, also very loudly.

During the summer months in their uncle's Asti villa, her male cousins would torment Rita, who vehemently rejected the idea of male superiority, by jeering that no women could compare with Newton, Einstein, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and other male geniuses in the arts and sciences. Rita was gratified that her brother and father refrained from such harassment. In fact, her father always insisted that the most intelligent of his siblings was his sister Tina. A little younger than Adamo, since early childhood she had displayed extraordinary gifts for music and mathematics, and when she was over sixty, she became a very successful sculptor.

From Adamo, who dominated his wife and children but boasted about his sister's accomplishments, Rita paradoxically gained assurance that women could achieve on a very high level, and was perhaps thereby empowered to choose medicine as a career, Paola choosing art, like Aunt Tina. In fact, Gino also wanted to be a sculptor, but Adamo felt his son should follow in his footsteps and become an engineer. Gino compromised by studying architecture and became one of the most prominent Italian architects of the post-war period.

Though Rita adored her mother and was Adele's favorite child, her father's influence was far stronger. Why did she not attribute to adults the warmth she experienced from her mother rather than the fearsomeness of her father's anger? It was only after Adamo's death that she began to wonder whether his rages derived from his alienating role as a business man which he, an engineer, had to play in order to support the family; and to recognize that her habit of underestimating, and thus overcoming, the obstacles she encountered was part of her paternal heritage. In 1988 Rita dedicated her autobiography "To Paola and to the memory of our father whom she adored while he lived and whom I loved and worshipped after his death." The adored mother, also dead by this time, strangely was left out.

Religion was problematic early in Rita's life. Cincirla, the twins' governess for a brief period, was a religious fanatic who worked for Jews in order to convert them, thought Rita, and whose sinister portrayal of Jews undoubtedly contributed to Rita's uncertainties. In one story Cincirla had Israelites, as they were called, go into a church in Messina, Sicily, and challenge the image of Jesus to send an earthquake if he was really a god, and the next day the city was devastated by a terrible earthquake. This was surely savage behavior to innocent victims by a god culturally intent on proving himself. [9] Cincirla tried to persuade the children to go with her to church to receive holy water from the priest so that they could be saved from the curse hanging over all Israelites and go to heaven when they died. [10] When Rita was told that her parents would not be able to go to heaven with them, she rejected this golden opportunity to slip through the pearly gates.

Since the family did not go to church or synagogue, the Catholic children with whom the twins played were curious about their religion; whereupon Adamo notified them, before they could even read and write, that they were freethinkers and could choose or refuse a religion when they reached the age of twenty-one. Never having heard of the freethinkers' religion, the neighbors were puzzled, which isolated the twins even more. Perhaps they inferred, from Adamo's strategy of omission and supplantation, that they were not to identify as Jews. But this would have increased their confusion, in view of his strong Jewish identification.

In the liberal climate that pervaded Italy after the Risorgimento, Adamo was a secular Jew, his admired uncle-stepfather having failed in his attempt to make a rabbi of him, though the attempt implies a religious education. Moreover, as a university student his classmates and friends were mainly Catholic, and two of them married his sisters. But Adamo never thought of converting to Catholicism, and fought a boy who made insulting remarks about Jews. Still when it came to his children, he decided they should forego a religious education, and thereby denied them the Jewish identification he himself never relinquished. Presumably his son Gino was not circumcised and did not celebrate a Bar Mitzvah. Without being imprinted by these rudders of Judaism, and with his father's emphasis on free thinking, Gino must have found it easy to convert to Catholicism in later life. While the daughters retained their Jewish identity, Gino the architect, with his way to make in the world, may have converted for the same reasons many Italians, Jews and non-Jews, found it expedient to join the Fascist Party.

Religion was a source of disturbance to the Levi children from both Catholic and Jewish perspectives. Yom Kippur was the occasion of a head-on collision with their cousins, the children of Adele's sister. The two families spent this time of the year in the lush wine-producing Asti area, in their uncle's villa, surrounded by a vineyard and an orchard full of ripe fruit, which the Levi children devoured on the Day of Atonement as on other days, despite the scorn and scowls of their cousins.

To please his wife, Adamo consented to attend the Passover Seder held at the home of her uncles and her Aunt Anna, in the company of Adele's sister's family and her three bachelor brothers. The one Rita liked best was Uncle Manno because he, like her mother, was tall, blond, and English-looking. The mayor of a village in the Asti hills, he had brought to it electricity, the telephone, and a school.

Rita liked the exotic food and the beautiful table setting of her great-aunt Anna, but her father's behavior during the reading of the Hagaddah distressed her. One of Adele's uncles read it in Italian, and when he reached the part about the infliction of the ten plagues on the Egyptians, Adamo would murmur "What hatred!" despite Aunt Anna's reproachful look and his wife's whispered plea, "Damino, please!" Turning to his children he would say, "I can't understand why five thousand years afterward, we have to take pleasure not so much in the end of slavery and the exodus from Egypt as in the fact that the Eternal Father punished our enemies with all these plagues." [11 Rita agreed with her father, but his conflict with Aunt Anna, who had adopted and raised Adele, was painful for everyone. In the interests of making his children into good freethinkers Adamo felt compelled to warn them against routine acceptance of the Bible, and the dictates of authority in general. In fact, it seemed as though they were to acc ept no authority but his. In recounting these incidents Rita was at pains to stress that her father fully recognized his "Jewish stock" and was proud of the "indomitable tenacity" [12] and spiritual values of his uncle-stepfather and of other members of the family and friends of his youth. But his children, denied a similar identification, could hardly share his pride.

When the Levi children completed middle school, their parents had to choose a high school which would prepare them for university, or give them vocational or artistic training. Gino, of course, went to the high school that prepared him for university. Adamo, with two sisters who had doctoral degrees in literature and mathematics, might have been motivated to send his daughters, who were as interested and adept in learning as Gino, to the same high school. But Adamo's sisters had found it very difficult to reconcile their studies with their conjugal and maternal roles. He sent his daughters to the girls' high school. [13]

After they graduated Nina prepared for her arranged marriage, Paola studied art with a well-known artist, and Rita was unhappy. Timid in adolescence as in childhood, she was not interested in sports, or in the social life of young women looking for husbands. "The subordinate role played by the female in a society run entirely by men," she wrote, "made the status of a wife less than attractive" and she had no interest at all in babies. [14] At this juncture her governess, Giovanna, who had been with the family since before Rita was born, was operated on for stomach cancer. Confronted by the critical illness of a woman she dearly loved, Rita decided to study medicine, and assured Giovanna she would make her well again. But she died very soon after she left the hospital.

For the next two years Rita tried to convince her father to allow her to go to medical school but, with the conflicts of his educated sisters in mind, he objected that "it was a long and difficult course of study, unsuitable for a woman." [15] Finally he yielded. Rita and her cousin Eugenia spent a year studying Latin, Greek and mathematics with tutors, and philosophy, literature and history on their own. Rita headed the list of candidates on the entrance exams, and in 1930 she and Eugenia enrolled in Turin University Medical School on the banks of the River Po.

Near the end of her second year Adamo began to experience frequent anginal pains, but he continued to use public transportation to go the long distance from Turin to Bari, where his ice-producing factory and distillery were located. During the economic crises and industrial strikes of Italy after the first World War, the businesses would have failed if Adele's three well-to-do bachelor brothers hadn't paid the bills, at the same time blaming Adamo's problems on his poor administration. Adele, the protected wife, vigorously defended her husband and thenceforth accompanied him to Bari, sharing his troubles. When Adamo decided to build a new factory and distillery in Turin, he was already exhausted by his efforts to avoid bankruptcy in Ban; after suffering a series of heart attacks, he died in 1932. Rita began to view her father as a man of his times, to respect his initiative as an engineer, his energy as a business man, and his efforts to support and educate his children. Finally, she allowed herself to love him.

Rita and Eugenia were two of the seven young women among the three hundred students who attended the Institute of Anatomy at the Medical School. Rita passed her first-year exams with honors, and enrolled for the second year, attracted by the personality of Giuseppe Levi, no relative, "celebrated in Turin University as a scientist, for the antifascism he professed with supreme disdain for the most elementary rules of caution, and for his terrible but short-lived fits of rage." [16] Her life with her father had made Rita an unknowing apprentice for discipleship with Giuseppe, whose rages she also had to abide; he had much to teach her.

In histology, a branch of anatomy that deals with the minute structures of animals and plant tissues discernible with the microscope, Rita lacked the "green fingers" on which success with the slicing cf tissues depended. Rodolfo Amprino, a gifted student who became her closest friend during the difficult years ahead, would frown when he inspected her slides, though he was impressed by her ability in applying the silver-impregnation technique on nervous tissues. Giuseppe assigned to Rita the study of the processes involved in forming the convolutions of the brains of human fetuses. But legal abortions were not performed in hospitals in the early 1930s, and there was no way she could obtain any of the enormous numbers performed clandestinely by doctors and midwives. Giuseppe concluded she was not cut out for research, but an emergency operation saved her. Concerned about the health of his students, Giuseppe frequently came to the hospital to see Rita. When she emerged, she was assigned a project that gratified her, and marked "the beginning of a Master-disciple relationship characterized by increasing affection and esteem which lasted until his death thirty-one years later." [17]

Rita and Eugenia were entrusted with research that later became the topic of their doctoral dissertations. They demonstrated for the first time that the formation of reticular fibers, situated primarily in the brain stem and revealed by a particular argentic staining, was a property of muscular and epithelial tissues as well as of connective tissue. The experience Rita gained studying tissues, especially nervous tissues in vitro (outside the living body), led her later to perfect this technique, which was so important in her discovery of the Nerve Growth Factor. "For the first time," she wrote, "I became passionate about research." [18]

Rita made few friends at the university. With her grim face and the severe nunlike clothes she made for herself, she was described by a classmate "as a kind of squid, ready to squirt ink at anybody who came near." [19] However, several male students tried to break down the barrier. One student was Guido, who always whistled a Beethoven symphony or a Mozart aria; Rita liked to ride on the back of his motorcycle. Their friendship lasted after graduation and the Nazi occupation; he played a heroic and dangerous role in the underground struggle, and his escape was miraculous. [20]

In the dissection room Rita met Germano, a blue-eyed, blond youth, who courted her throughout the university years. His father was the doctor in a mountain village, but his timid mother could barely write her name, and Guido felt that his inferior family background precluded marriage to Rita. However, as soon as the anti-Jewish laws were passed, Germano proposed marriage. From membership in the Fascist party, like the vast majority of young men in those years, he became a ferocious anti-Fascist when the newspapers began their attacks on Jews. The Levis were amazed by his open discussion of marriage to Rita, and his indifference to the harm such a marriage would do to his career. However, this possibility was eliminated by the decree in November, 1938, prohibiting marriage between "Aryan" citizens and Jews. In any case, Rita, despite her fondness for Germano, would not have married him; their cultural differences were too great.

Rita graduated summa cum laude, at the head of her class, in 1936, and was rewarded by a trip to a scientific conference in Sweden. She decided to specialize in neurology and psychiatry, and was given a job as assistant lecturer in the Anatomy Department. When the anti-Jewish laws were passed Rita was dismissed from the neurology clinic and from her academic post, and deprived of the right to practice medicine. However, she accepted an invitation to continue her research at a neurology institute in Brussels. Germano, Paola, and Gino accompanied her to the border, and before they parted Germano said mournfully that this was the last time they would meet; he had contracted tuberculosis and expected to die very soon. When his condition worsened Rita came back to Italy to visit him, and at his death, she knelt with his family for the last rites in the village church. A short time later, the threat of a German invasion of Belgium led to her return to Italy.

During the early stages of the press attacks on the Jews Rita was bewildered. By 1938 all the Italian newspapers, from the notoriously antisemitic ones to those that had been neutral, even liberal, were scurrilous, and Rita went into a stupor. But when she was dismissed that year from the University she experienced a sense of liberation from the nightmare of an antisemitism, all the more menacing for being invisible and yet ever present," [21] that had tormented her since early childhood. Seventy years after Piedmont conferred equal rights on all citizens regardless of religion, these rights were abrogated for Jews. In the reality of persecution Rita responded defiantly: "For the first time I felt pride in being Jewish and not Israelite, as we had been called in the liberal climate of my early years, and though still profoundly secular, I felt a bond with those who were, like me, the victims of the lurid campaign unleashed by the Fascist press." [22]

At first Rita practiced medicine surreptitiously by caring for the poor people of Turin without fees, but the need to have "Aryan" doctors sign prescriptions forced her to abandon this practice. In the fall of 1940, Rodolfo Amprino, recently returned from the United States, came to see her. Receiving no reply when he asked about her projects, he suggested, in his brusque Piedmontese manner, that she set up a small laboratory and continue her research, as eminent scientists had done with poor equipment in the past. Rodolfo re-awakened Rita's desire, since earliest childhood, to venture into unknown lands, now represented by the nervous system.

Chick embryos could easily be procured and incubated at home, and Gino helped her build a lab. The stereomicroscope for operating on the embryos, and a binocular Zeiss microscope, with eyepieces and photographic apparatus, were the most expensive items. Other items included a watchmaker's forceps, ophthalmic microscissors and ordinary sewing needles which Rita ground into very sharp microscalpels. Gino built a glass thermo-regulated box with circular openings in front through which Rita could insert her arms and operate on the embryos under the microscope. The first experiments turned out well.

Soon after Italy entered the war, one summer Rita was riding on a cattle train used by civilians for short journeys in the provinces, since the civilian trains were appropriated for troop transportation. Sitting on the floor with her legs dangling over the side, holding on to the vertical bars and the hand of Guido, the aria whistler, she read in an American journal an article by Viktor Hamburger, that interested her. It described an experiment which she replicated many times, and in the winter of 1942 she wrote up her findings, different from Hamburger's, in an article she sent to a Belgian journal.

Later that year the Allies began systematically to bomb the cities of northern Italy, particularly industrialized Turin, and the Levis, along with many other Turinese, moved to the Astigiano highlands, an hour from Turin. Rita set up her lab on a little table in the corner of the dining area of a small house they rented, and cycled from hill to hill begging farmers to sell her their eggs, particularly the fertilized ones, for "her babies." [23] The burgeoning of plant and animal life in the springtime stimulated her interest in the nervous system of different specimens, and she came to realize how "individual cells behave in a way similar to that of living beings, how plastic and malleable is the entire nervous system," [24] unlike the rigid and unchanging structure described in neuranatomy textbooks of the time.

On September 8 Badoglio, who became prime minister when Mussolini resigned, announced that the Italian troops had ceased all hostilities against the Allies. On that terrible date, to which Jewish survivors refer time and again, like the antiphon to a dirge, the Germans marched into Italy, and into Italy they brought the Holocaust, with its roundups, mass shootings, Gestapo interrogations, incarcerations, disappearances, and eventual deportations to extermination camps.

But during this terrible time, Italians kept faith with the Jews. One example was the protection that nuns and doctors gave to a brother of Adele who, hospitalized before September 8, remained in the clinic after that date. "Everybody in Asti knew of his presence in the clinic," wrote Rita, "but so deep was the hatred for the Nazi-Fascists, and so strong the general pity for the persecuted, that no one informed on him or on the many other clandestine Jews. Indeed in courageous solidarity, thousands of Italians offered Jews protection at grave risk to themselves." [25] Very soon the Levis were also to experience such beneficence.

On September 10 German tanks were sitting outside Turin's central railway station and the German military police took control of city traffic. The Levis had to flee for their lives. They tried crossing into Switzerland but were rebuffed by the Italian guards at the frontier. With false identity cards, they then boarded a train going south and Rita found herself facing a former fellow student in a Fascist uniform, who asked where they were heading. In the chaos at the railway station, she said, they had boarded the wrong train and would be getting off at the next stop. This turned out to be Florence. They got off the train in a heavy downpour very early in the morning and phoned a friend of Paola, who took them to meet Consilia Leoncini.

Looking intently at Adele, Paola, and Rita, Consilia said, "I have a room available and would be glad to rent it on condition you are not Jews.,, [26] She couldn't take risks with her father and sister ill in the house, and her son away at the front. They said their name was Lupani, assured her they were Catholics from Apulia, and Consilia gave them a large room. Thereafter they spent their time filling out false identity cards, printed by the Partisans, which they distributed to friends who also managed to reach Florence. With the identity cards they procured ration cards, which "sanctioned, at least temporarily, the right to life, of which we had been deprived by the Nazi invasion of Italy. [27] Meanwhile they discovered that Consilia was an ardent anti-Fascist and they all listened to the BBC every evening on the radio. They also learned from Cosetta, Consilia's daughter, that her mother had realized they were Jews early on when Adele repeatedly contradicted herself about their past life, but they decided to accept the risk of sheltering them. Giuseppe Levi also managed to reach Florence, where his wife and two children were staying, and he and Rita edited a new edition of his two volumes on histology.

On August 3, 1944 a state of emergency was proclaimed in Florence, limiting movement during the day and imposing a curfew. That night the sorrowful Florentines watched the Nazis blow up the beautiful, ancient bridges over the Arno, so that no supplies could reach the city, which was now without water, bread, and electricity. For the next month the Germans and the Partisans alternately held various parts of the city, and although Nazi and Fascist snipers on the roofs constantly fired at passersby, Rita went out into the streets, risking being blown up by one of the mines the Germans had scattered about, to breathe the air of freedom. On September 2 the British marched into Florence and for the first time Rita saw a bus marked with a Star of David, now no longer an object of derision, and thirsty people drank from watertanks bearing the same emblem.

Early in September Rita registered with the Allied health service where she and three other doctors were assigned to what was to be her most intense, exhausting, and last experience as a medical doctor. With the British and American troops and Italian Partisans fighting the Germans in the Apennines south of Bologna, Allied trucks brought to Florence hundreds of endangered families of farm workers from that area. Because nurses were scarce Rita acted as both doctor and nurse in a huge, old, decayed, military barracks, where babies and old people lay, suffering from malnutrition and cold, and many of the newborns, extremely dehydrated, died. Toward the end of winter the number of refugees suffering from abdominal typhoid became epidemic in the overcrowded barracks where the drinking water was polluted, Taking care of the seriously ill, Rita was constantly exposed to contagion. As the death rate increased, her feeling of impotence grew; she was unable to muster the necessary detachment.

In July, 1945, the Levis returned to Turin, and Rita, severely depressed, decided she would never practice medicine again. Along with Giuseppe Levi and the other Jewish professors who had survived, Rita resumed her previous position in the School of Medicine. Aware of her inadequate scientific training, she also took courses in the biology department, and started a research project with Rodolfo Amprimo, with whom she ate her lunch sandwich every day, sitting serenely outdoors in the sunlight.

One summer morning in 1946 Giuseppe showed Rita a letter from Viktor Hamburger, who had read Rita's paper in the Belgian journal, her conclusions different from his, inviting her to spend a semester with him to investigate the problem further. In 1947 she set sail for the New World and, after war-torn Italy, found the Garden of Eden in the biology department of Washington University, in St. Louis, Missouri, chaired by Viktor Hamburger. The investigation of the problem that had brought Rita to St. Louis, "the effects of amputation on the development of the nervous centers in charge of the innervation of the excised limbs" [28] of chick embryos, proved Rita's findings to be valid.

Once settled in the department, where she was to remain for 30 years rather than one semester, Rita began to explore St. Louis and its environs, and to visit her former classmate, microbiologist Salvador Luria, chairman of the biology department of Indiana University at Bloomington. Several times she met James Watson, Luria's student, who was invariably rude to her, "a frail foreign woman," as she described herself at this time. She attributed his attitude to his "well-known anti-feminism," [29] which Rosalind Franklin, the English physical chemist, was later to experience when, unbeknownst to her, he used her experimental data on the structure of the DNA molecule in his own work, won a Nobel Prize, and then drew a vicious portrait of her as a spinsterish feminist in Tue Double Helix. [30]

At this time Rita had many doubts about the value of the neuroembryological research she was doing. But one day, examining her latest series of silver-salt-impregnated chick-embryo sections, it became clear to her that nervous systems were more accessible to investigation than she had imagined. "The revelations of that day stayed permanently inscribed in my memory as marking not only the end of the long period of doubt and lack of faith in my research," wrote Rita, "but also the sealing of a lifelong alliance between me and the nervous system." [31]

It seemed to Rita that the nerve cells and their fibers were being transmitted in a way characteristic of a humoral (relating to bodily fluid) substance, and she decided to test her hypothesis. She confirmed the humoral nature of the substance, which she called the "nerve-growth promoting agent," [32] and concluded it could be identified by the in-vitro (outside the body) technique. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, she decided to visit her friend, Hertha Meyer, who had long ago set up an in-vitro culture unit at the University of Rio de Janeiro. At the end of summer, 1952 she implanted cells of two different tumors respectively into two white mice, put them in a small cardboard box, with an apple for food and drink, fitted it into her coat pocket, and set off for a few days in Italy before going on to Brazil, where she repeatedly confirmed her basic findings.

She spent her last night in Rio at the ocean, which was lit by thousands of tiny flames from the torches of the many people joyously paying tribute to Iemanja, goddess of the sea, during Carnival.

On her return to St. Louis she met and began her collaboration with Dr. Stanley Cohen, a flute-playing biochemist and newly-appointed research associate in the biology department. With his vague notions about the nervous system and Rita's inadequate knowledge of biochemistry, both profited immensely from their collaboration. "You and I are good, Rita," Stan said, "but together we are wonderful." [33]

Immediately after her return to St Louis Rita had set up an in-vitro culture unit, and after a year of intense work they found the growth-stimulating substance, which they named the Nerve Growth Factor (NGF). This occurred in 1958, and that year Viktor fired Stan, who left Washington University six months later. After working together from 1953 to 1959. which Rita termed "the six most intense and productive years of my life," the news "sounded to her like the tolling of a funeral bell." [34]

Until Stan appeared, Rita and Viktor had worked closely together, but the Rita/Stan collaboration left Viktor out, and, using his power as chairman, he ended it. Rita was in despair, but was at no time critical of Viktor, who had brought her out of devastated Italy and helped her establish herself as a scientist in the United States. But now she changed her relationship to him. With a grant from the National Science Foundation, in 1961 she established a counterpart laboratory in Rome, where she spent six months of each year, alternating the direction of the lab and her work at Washington University with a colleague, biochemist Piero Angeletti. Adele died in 1963, and now the twins lived together again, in Rome, where Rita partially overcame the barrier that Paola had long ago erected against her. Extremely knowledgeable about painting and sculpture, Paola, an artist's artist, drew closer to Rita during their talks about art at home and in art galleries.

Rita's project, begun with a limited goal and many researchers, was welcomed by the Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerce, CNR (National Research Council) in Rome, which gave her some funding after the first year, to supplement her grant from the National Science Foundation. Also, the Institute of Health made available three large, fully-equipped rooms, and within three months Rita's unit was larger than the one in the biology department at Washington University. But, accustomed to the cordial "Hi, Doc" of American technicians and students, she was embarrassed by the Italian obsequiousness and ceremony (abolished by the student revolts of the late 1960s) which regulated relationships between professors and all others.

In the cheerful atmosphere of the first half of the 1960s the deciphering of the NGF's mechanism of action seemed near completion. But despite the interest aroused by the two articles Rita and Stan published, few scientists explored this area, "the results being so perplexing and hard to reconcile with prevailing theory." [35]

In 1969 Rita's small Center of Neurobiology became an official organ of the CNR which she directed as the Laboratory of Cell Biology. Situated in the midst of Rome's chaotic traffic, its location was in great contrast with Washington University's quiet, orderly campus and the stability engendered by security guards, which permitted Rita to work in her lab at any hour of the day or night. In Washington, Vincenzo Bocchini and Pietro Angeletti perfected techniques for purifying NGF, enabling Ruth Hogue Angeletti and Ralph Bradshaw to elucidate the amino acid sequence of the protein molecule in 1971. In 1983 this knowledge enabled two teams of investigators in the United States to identify the DNA that codes for the molecule and its originating gene in different animal species, including human beings. [36]

In 1977 Rita reached retirement age in Washington University and in 1979, in Rome. "Since then," she writes, "I have been allowed, if not without opposition, to continue to work in the capacity of a guest in the institute which I had seen born under better auspices ten years earlier." [37] She directs the Rome laboratory where Aloe supervises seven young women, one of whom, Luisa Bracchi-Laudiero, told me that her grandmother, but not her mother, had always encouraged her interest in science, and proudly calls her "my little Levi-Montalcini." Aloe mentioned to me that in Italy many more women are entering the sciences and applying to labs than ever before, Rita being their primary role model, although, as in the United States, they rarely go beyond the middle levels.

Throughout the 1980s an outburst of activity surrounded NGF, and the identification of the gene coding for human NGF made possible its synthesis in great quantities. The findings have given rise to the hypothesis linking its absence, reduction, or damage to many of the nervous system dysfunctions for which there is still no known cure. By the middle 1980s Rita's importance as a major scientist was recognized. In 1986 she received a Lasker award, the most prestigious science prize in the United States. In the same year Rita and Stanley Cohen were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for their discovery of the Nerve Growth Factor.

Of the 625 prizes that have been awarded in the ninety-three year period of the Nobel prize, women have received only twenty-five, and of those, only five in medicine and physiology. She is the first Italian woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science. Rita had to wait for the prize until she was 77 years old. The cytogeneticist, Barbara McClintock, had to wait about forty years until 1983, when she was 81 years old. James Watson waited nine years, thanks to his use of Rosalind Franklin's experimental data on the structure of the DNA molecule. In addition to their scientific genius Rita and Barbara had to have a lucky gene for longevity.

Besides publishing more than 200 articles on science, several articles on the social significance of science, and her autobiography, Rita wrote "The Feminine Awakening," a paper dealing with the women's emancipation movement from its origin in the early nineteenth century to 1970. She presented it in 1971 at the "Pro Cultura Feminile" Conference in Turin, and it was finally published in the journal Lettera in May, 1994. Obviously, Rita has always been a passionate feminist.

Rita speaks to adolescents in schools throughout Italy, urging them to face life with optimism and faith in people, and quoting Ann Frank's farewell words on the eve of the discovery of the Frank hiding place by the Nazis: "I think that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquillity will return again. In the meantime I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out." It came for Rita.

Dr. Shirley Tilghman, professor of molecular biology at Princeton, writes: "The culture of science evolved in a period when it was being practiced exclusively by men, and that has greatly influenced the outcome. It is a men's game, and it continues to be played by men's rules. Linda Wilson, president of Radcliffe and a chemist, recently suggested that the fierce rivalries and ruthless competition among scientists was incompatible with the inclusion of women and minorities in science.[ldot] But science is an extraordinary profession. I know of few other professions where the excitement that brought you to the field in the first place is sustained over so many years. It would be a tragedy to exclude women from all this fun." [38] And indeed, for Rita Levi-Montalcini, science is pure joy, as much at eighty-five as at twenty.

On April 22, 1999 Rita had her ninetieth birthday, and also celebrated the publication of her new book Ninety Years in the Galaxy of the Mind, in which, continuing her studies of the brain, she devises a system of ethics for the new generations.

Milan is only one of the cities in Italy which celebrated both her birthday and new book. The Milanese newspaper, Corriere della Sera, carried an informative article, which was translated by Scottish-born Joan Rundo, a Milanese bilingual translator:

The walls of Milan are plastered with huge posters showing her diaphanous and determined face. They announce the celebrations that are to be held in the city for a really special birthday, her ninetieth. Rita Levi Montalcini, Nobel Prize Winner for Medicine in 1986, was born in Turin on April 22, 1909, but Milan will be celebrating the birthday in advance, tomorrow and Saturday. Honours and events appear under the aegis of the association "Ten Nobels for the Future," which each year organizes meetings or projects on science, economics, ethics. This seventh edition is the first one to celebrate a birthday, and the first to

give a present For Rita the present is the exhibition of an artist very dear to her, her twin sister Paola. And the picture that Rita wanted on the cover of her new book, La Galassia Mente, which comes out on April 20, is by Paola, as was her previous book L'Asso Nella Manica a Brandelli, a best-seller, a work on the potential of the brain.

Rita Levi Montalcini's objective is not to disseminate pure scientific knowledge. Along with the explanations of how neurons and dendrites function,-and, in the case of this book, how inorganic matter developed into organic matter, and how the nervous system was born, up to the development of the human brain--there is a message which is essentially one of values, ethics. The chapters, as complex and fascinating as they are clear, describe the evolutionary process of millions of years, aims, and arrives at, the Cogito, Ergo Sum of Descartes, and "man is only a reed, but a thinking reed" of Pascal. The still mysterious coupling of the brain and the mind is explained to lay readers with the sole objective of reaching the heart of man and woman, illustrating their capacities of awareness and, therefore, of free will and responsibility.

A brilliant example of this double path can be found in the pages on the "theory of the three brains," according to which our skull contains the two brains, superimposed in the course of time, which we have inherited from our reptile and mammalian ancestors, then overlapped and incorporated by a third brain, the typically human cortex. The explanation proceeds in neutral scientific terms, then we go on to read: "In periods of obscurantism, the reptile comes out of its lair with a swastika on its claws."

To understand Rita, who is Jewish, she emphasizes that biology and culture, including science, were, as is well known, affected by Nazism and its Italian version, the Racial Laws. And it was from a laboratory set up in a kitchen, after having been expelled from the University of Turin, that she set out on her exceptional scaling of the heights of research, climaxing with the Nobel Prize. But she does not talk about this; that is the past. [ldots] On Saturday she will perhaps talk of this in the afternoon dedicated to her at the Conservatory of Milan. The host will be her fellow Nobel Prize Winner and lifelong friend, Renato Dulbecco. Rita will speak with Emma Bonino before the concert in her honor, to be conducted by Accardo. "I have known Emma for some time. I do not know what she will ask me," says the professor in a gentle voice. "But I think that we will also talk about the War. For me, the Rainbow Operation (fund-raising campaign going on in Italy for the Kosovo refugees) or the help is not enough. We h ave to have mass education of young people, even if I don't know how."

In 1993 Rita discovered, in a collection of letters from Bosnian children, a letter from a twelve-year-old girl, who wrote to the persecuting Serbs: "My angry people must forgive me if I cannot hate you, because I think that we twelve-year-olds have not yet fallen into the abyss of hatred."' Rita was very struck by these words. "I was able to have that little girl sought out by the journalists there; they found her, she is the daughter of working-class people and now she is at Zagreb University. Her name is Tomana Grubesic. On May 3rd she will come to Rome for a scholarship from my Foundation, and on May 4th she will meet Rutelli, the mayor of Rome. I wanted her to become an emblem of the new generations. Without hatred."

This theme is the focus of "Primo Levi's Message," which forms the epilogue to Rita's autobiography, In Praise of Imperfection. Here she addresses her friend, a fellow Turinese, a man without hatred. She quotes his characteristic modest comment: "I beg the reader not to go looking for messages. It is a term which I abhor because it puts me in crisis, because it dresses me in clothes which are not mine, which on the contrary belong to a human type whom I view with distrust: the prophet, the bard, the soothsayer. That I am not." [39]

Rita replies:

Today the terms message and messengers have lost their sacred aura and have acquired a human and secular dimension "And to her fellow scientist, the chemist, she adds: "they have come to be used also to indicate chemical agents that transmit information from one cell to another. These "messages" [ldots] play a fundamental role in organic processes and especially in those thought to be typical of the nervous system.

Your message, Primo, which tens of thousands of readers received [ldots] [has an] extraordinary force [which] cannot be attributed either to a prophetic tone--which, in all instances, you disdainfully avoid--or to the novelty of its content. Others before you have, and others after you will continue, to denounce the tragic consequences of servile devotion, unconditioned obedience, and supine acceptance of orders from fanatical and paranoid leaders. But no one has ever done it with the same suffered efficacy as you, with a more implacable analysis of the mentality and motives that led criminals, such as the commandant at Auschwitz, to act as they did; or, at the same time, with a greater detachment and absence of hatred. [ldots]

However, for the millions of individuals who [ldots] out of cowardice collaborate with their executioners, there have been thousands of others who throughout the ages have not surrendered--either in the face of torture or of death--and who have kept alive the fire of hope for their comrades as well. You were one of them, Primo. You who explained to your young comrade Jean--who couldn't understand Italian and had been cast along with you into the inferno at Auschwitz--the meaning of Ulysses's admonition, which sounded for you like the very voice of God:

Considerate la vostra semenza:

Fatti no foste a viver come bruti. [40]

[ldots] It is a message of hope, because whoever has voiced it while in the deepest despair, as were you, has kept intact the highest qualities of Homo sapiens-sapiens and come out of the most atrocious of all experiences with an upright forehead and a spirit pure. [41]

RUBY ROHRLICH, who died December 10, 1999, was a Research Professor in the Anthropology Department, George Washington University and Emerita Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York. Born in Montreal, Canada, she was author/editor of four books and a dozen articles in the fields of anthropology, women's studies, and Jewish studies.

NOTES

(1.) Rita Levi-Montalcini, In Praise of Imperfection: My Life and Work, translated by Luigi Attardi (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 28.

(2.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 30.

(3.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 21.

(4.) Omni, March, 1988: 104.

(5.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 30

(6.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 30.

(7.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 4.

(8.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 31.

(9.) Michael O. Carroll, Madonnas That Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1992). Italians wove an intricate pattern of ritual and belief around madonnas and saints in the attempt to gain control over the many real dangers, such as plagues, famines, diseases, earthquakes, and floods, confronting them. The "dark side" of Italian holiness was the willingness of these madonnas and saints, even the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, to maim, even to kill, in order to maintain their own cults.

(10.) In The Jews in Piedmont (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1990), Renata Segre describes the constant attempts in Italy to baptize Jewish children, even two-year-old babies, by sprinkling water over them and uttering a few words that presumably converted them into Christians. This was done by priests and the laity, by adults and youngsters, and was not only condoned but encouraged by the Inquisition, which sent constables to seize the children from their parents.

(11.) In Praise of Imperfection, pp. 23-24.

(12.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 25.

(13.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 34.

(14.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 35.

(15.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 38.

(16.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 50.

(17.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 59.

(18.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 60.

(19.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 62.

(20.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 64.

(21.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 80.

(22.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 80.

(23.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 95.

(24.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 97.

(25.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 101.

(26.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 102.

(27.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 103.

(28.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 139.

(29.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 138.

(30.) James D. Watson, The Donble Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (New York: Atheneum, 1968).

(31.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 143.

(32.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 151.

(33.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 163.

(34.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 167.

(35.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 196.

(36.) In spite of these important contributions, it would have been very difficult for NGF research to continue in Italy had it not been for Pietro Calissano and Luigi Aloe, who collaborated with Rita for over twenty years in St. Louis and in Rome. During the second half of the 1970s the CNR favored microbiology over neurobiology, especially in funding. Production in Rita's lab was quantitatively and qualitatively far inferior to that in other European and in American labs where, increasingly, large, well-equipped teams of scientists were studying NGF. The desire to work independently was much stronger in Italy than in the United States, and the group of researchers and technicians that Rita had put together was losing its members. Dr. Pietro Calissano, director of the Institute of Neurobiology, CNR, whom I interviewed in 1991, attributed this loss partially to the fact that researchers found Rita to be controlling, pressuring. Also, according to Ruth Hogue Angeletti, American students were put off by Rita's outbursts when they committed errors. Her tirades were undoubtedly far less ferocious than those of Giuseppe Levi, for example, which were meekly accepted by male students. Calissano, Aloe and many others found Rita to be open, ethical, direct, honest, and the soul of generosity. But she preferred working in her lab to teaching and administration, particularly during a time when women science professors and directors of scientific research were few in number and resented both in the United States and Italy.

(37.) In Praise of Imperfection, p. 199.

(38.) "Science vs. the Female Scientist," The New York Times, 1/26/93.

(39.) In Praise of Perfection, p. 212. Corriere della Sera, April 15th, 1999.

(40.) Take thought of the seed from which you spring You were not born to live as brutes.

(41.) In Praise of Imperfection, pp. 2 12-214.

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