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Examines the life of Rita Levi-Montalcini, a woman scientist who won the Nobel Prize or her research in neurology.
As a woman growing up in early 20th-century Italy, Rita Levi-Montalcini was expected to marry, not pursue an education. Against the objections of her father, she attended Turin School of Medicine, graduating with honors as an M.D. But her hopes of an academic position vanished with the fascist Italian government's persecution of the Jews in the late 1930s and early 1940s. At the risk of her own life, Levi-Montalcini continued studying how the body s nervous system develops and discovered the nerve growth factor, a protein that controls the growth of neurons and is required for their survival. Building upon her findings, she and a host of other researchers unearthed a whole class of compounds that are intimately involved in every stage of a cell s or an organism s life, from conception to death. Today, scientists are still exploring the implications of her work, from cancer treatments to Alzheimer s disease management to research on birth defects, and more. As Rita Levi-Montalcini shows, this woman's incredible persistence and faith in herself allowed her to persevere through tough opposition and earn a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986.
This volume is a collection of articles written by Nobel Laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini and published from 1942 to 1995. Studies described in the first part set the stage for the discovery of a protein molecule which became known as the Nerve Growth Factor (NGF), described in detail in the second part. The NGF synthesized in minute amounts in all vertebrate tissues, plays an essential role in the differentiation and survival of several nerve cell populations in the peripheral and central nervous system. The discovery of the NGF was defined by the Nobel Foundation as a milestone in developmental neurobiology, and the author was awarded in 1986 with this prestigious award. Studies pursued in subsequent years and still in progress, have unveiled other fundamental properties of the NGF, described in the third part of this volume.
The autobiography of Levi-Montalcini, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1986. Born in Torino into a middle-class Jewish family, she experienced the rise of fascism and antisemitism in the 1930s-40s (discussed on pp. 73-105). After the promulgation of the racial laws in 1938, it was impossible for her to pursue research at the Neurological Clinic and she continued her work in private. She survived the war hiding in a small town in Italy and later emigrated to the United States.
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“My experience in childhood and adolescence of the subordinate role played by the female in a society run entirely by men had convinced me that I was not cut out to be a wife.”—Rita Levi-Montalcini Self-assured from an early age, Rita knew that she was cut out for a number of other roles and the difference she could make in the lives of others. Prevailing over her father’s traditional values, Rita attended medical school and continued to study the development of the nervous system after graduating. But as a Jew in fascist Italy, her work came to a halt with discriminatory race laws and again later, when she was forced into hiding from the Nazis. In a makeshift lab built from black-ma...
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A time-travelling adventure with interactive experiments for budding young scientists, by Nobel Prize winning Barry Marshall Mary has always wanted to win a Nobel Prize and loves running her own science experiments at home. One day Mary stumbles on a secret meeting of Nobel Prize winners. Dr Barry Marshall agrees to travel with her through time to learn the secrets behind some of the most fascinating and important scientific discoveries. They talk time and space with Albert Einstein, radiation with Marie Curie, DNA with Crick, Watson and Wilkins – and much more. Filled with experiments to try at home and featuring famous Nobel prize-winners: Albert Einstein • Marie Curie • Guglielmo Marconi Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins • Alexander Fleming • Tu Youyou • Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar • Gertrude Elion • Norman Borlaug • Rita Levi-Montalcini • Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa • Barry Marshall and Robin Warren
'These minibiographies of women who persisted will move anyone with an avid curiosity about the world.' Publishers Weekly With a foreword by Athene Donald, Professor of Experimental Physics, University of Cambridge and Master of Churchill College. Ten Women Who Changed Science tells the moving stories of the physicists, biologists, chemists, astronomers and doctors who helped to shape our world with their extraordinary breakthroughs and inventions, and outlines their remarkable achievements. These scientists overcame significant obstacles, often simply because they were women. Their science and their lives were driven by personal tragedies and shaped by seismic world events. What drove these...
This invaluable book contains 36 interviews, including 26 with Nobel laureates. It presents a cross-section of biomedical science, a field that has been dominant in science for the past half century. The in-depth conversations cover important research areas and discoveries, as well as the roads to these discoveries, including aspects of the scientists' work that never saw publication. They also bring out the humanness of the famous scientists — the reader learns about their backgrounds, aspirations, failings, and triumphs. The book is illustrated with snapshots of the conversations and photos provided by the interviewees. It is a follow-up to the critically acclaimed Candid Science: Conversations with Famous Chemists, by the same author./a