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| Rita Levi Montalcini |
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| Italian-American
neurologist |
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Rita Levi
Montalcini born 04-22-1909 in Torino, Italy. As
a Jew, she was forced into hiding in Italy where she continued
to conduct experiments on chicken embryos in a homemade lab all
through World War II. RLM who held dual citizenship in Italy and
the United States spent 30 years working at the Washington
University, St. Louis. She also won the 1986 Lasker Basic
Medical Research Award. Because she
was a dual citizen of Italy and the United States, Levi-Montalcini
did her most important work at Washington Univ. with Stanley
Cohen. Studying mouse tumors implanted in chicken embryos, the
pair isolated a nerve-growth factor, the first of many cell-growth
factors found in animals. She made ground breaking discoveries
in the early 1950's of the Nerve Growth Factor. |
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| That helps
understanding of such disorders as cancer, birth defects, and
Alzheimer's. For this discovery Levi-Montalcini and Cohen were
awarded the 1986 Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Rita Levi-Montalcini was the
fourth woman to be awarded the Nobel prize for medicine or
physiology. From 1969 to 1978 she
served as director of the Institute of Cell Biology in Rome. You
can read her biography named "In Praise of Imperfection"
(1988). |
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| Interview with Rita Levi
Montalcini |
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Why did you feel it
was your duty to sign the appeal for ceasefire?
"Well, I think it's
clear. Because without peace, the human species ends. As Kennedy
said, either mankind will put an end to war, or war will put an
end to mankind".
Do you think that
laying down arms is enough to reach peace?
"Absolutely not. Laying down arms doesn't always
mean being at peace. Peace is not absence of war. Peace is
something that goes further, peace must be worked out and built.
I said many times that war has been a monopoly of the male sex.
Therefore, women have the most difficult task: to be builders of
peace". |
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What is peace for you?
"It's equality and fraternity. It's really an
extremely difficult process, which is in the hands of a small
group made up of, at the moment, people of high capacities and
ethic level. This is a constructive fact, not a negative one.
Actually it's very positive".
Is it important to
educate the young to peace?
"Everybody should be educated to peace, from
newborns to adults, everybody should be educated to a world of
fraternity. This is important: to create a culture of peace in
the new generations. I wrote about this in the first chapter of
my last book".
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