4.18.2009


A Toast to Rita!
Neurologist Rita Levi Montalcini will be 100 years old on April 22. The Italian scientist received the Nobel prize for medicine with Stanley Cohen of the United States, in 1986, for discoveries of mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs.

Miss Levi recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s under Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home.

"Above all, don't fear difficult moments," she said. "The best comes from them."