[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 2 (Friday, January 4, 2013)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E14-E15]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    IN HONOR OF RITA LEVI-MONTALCINI

                                  _____
                                 

                        HON. MICHAEL E. CAPUANO

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, January 4, 2013

  Mr. CAPUANO. Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor the memory and the heroic 
example of Rita Levi-Montalcini, Nobel Laureate in Medicine and 
Senator-for-Life of the Republic of Italy. My constituents in our 
district's universities, research institutes and teaching hospitals 
join me in this homage. Dr. Allen Mitchell, Professor of Epidemiology 
and Pediatrics at Boston University, studied with her and with her 
mentor, Victor Hamburger. Everyone, he remembered, recognized the 
``enormity of her contributions.'' ``But,'' he continued, ``those of us 
privileged to interact directly with her saw Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini 
as a role model who combined scientific passion and rigor with a great 
sense of humanity.''
  Edward A. Kravitz, George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology at 
the Harvard Medical School recalled that Dr. Levi-Montalcini was 
unfailingly kind and gracious to young researchers, welcoming them to 
her lab and her circle of distinguished colleagues. He was touched by 
her warmth and inspired by her eagerness always to know more.
  Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin in 1909, one of four children 
of an educated family, her father an engineer and mathematician, her 
mother, like her twin sister Paola, a gifted painter. The arts were 
thought appropriate pastimes for young ladies, but science was not, and 
her first struggle was convincing her father to let her study medicine. 
She graduated, summa cum laude, in Medicine and Surgery in 1936 and 
began a specialization in neurology and psychiatry. Two years later, 
Mussolini promulgated racial laws based on those already in effect in 
Nazi Germany, barring Jews from universities. Rita Levi-Montalcini's 
second and most remarkable struggle was to continue her research alone 
and in secret. She cultivated chick embryos in her bedroom and studied 
them closely. Her inspiration, she always acknowledged, came from a 
paper by Victor Hamburger, pioneer of experimental embryology. 
Hamburger, like many of the most prominent German and Italian 
scientists, was at that time already in the United States. She chose to 
remain in Italy, confident that her country would return to its 
democratic principles. She was associated with the struggle for 
Liberation and, in the time of greatest danger, moved her laboratory 
into the countryside where she and her family found refuge. When 
Florence was freed, she practiced medicine, for the only time in her

[[Page E15]]

life, among refugees fleeing the fighting that still raged in northern 
Italy.
  After the war, Dr. Levi-Montalcini joined Hamburger at Washington 
University in St. Louis. There began her collaboration with Dr. Stanley 
Cohen with whom she shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 
1986. Together they studied the biochemistry of nerve growth and 
revolutionized the study of cell growth and development. She flourished 
at Washington University but always maintained close ties to Italy and 
to a new generation of Italian scientists. She helped found the 
Institute of Cell Biology in Rome and became its first director. She 
died in Rome on December 30 at the age of 103. She continues to inspire 
us, and we do well to remember her brave advice, ``Above all, do not 
fear difficult moments. The best comes from them.''

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