4/18/2023 0 Comments Rita levi montalciniRita Levi Montalcini, in the late 1950s, identified a protein produced by the nerve cells themselves that is able to favor the multiplication and direct the growth of nerve fibers to the various organs. Rita Levi Montalcini, the discovery of NFG Together they attended the courses of a great biologist, Giuseppe Levi, a researcher of cell growth, in particular in nervous tissue. She was also the author of a splendid autobiography, Elogio dell’Imperfezione, where she tells how as a teenager she wanted to be a writer but that suddenly at twenty years his interests changed completely: He decided to enroll in medical school and graduated in 1936.Īmong his friends we also remember Savatore Luria and Renato Dulbecco, also future Nobel laureates. Rita Levi Montalcini, between science and culture, her strong youth ![]() She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986 and was appointed Senator for Life in 2001. He discovered NFG a protein produced by nerve cells whose differentiation and development directs. Well yes, a woman with a strong character, born at the beginning of the twentieth century from father engineer, Adam Levi and mother painter, Alice Montalcini, dedicated herself to the study of the development of the nervous system, which she perfected in the United States, where she lived for thirty years. When you think about what can be the passion for the study of the brain, the love for culture, Rita Levi Montalcini immediately thinks of everything that could refer to phenomena that in the war years were still completely unknown and that a great woman gave us the opportunity to get passionate about it thanks to her love and knowledge. But this in no way detracts from the scientific importance of Levi-Montalcini's insight into what is now seen as a fundamental component of the biology of normal development and of disease processes including cancer.Rita Levi Montalcini, passion and love for culture and science “But this was something quite different: a protein produced by a given tissue and not released but acting locally to promote the growth of cells.” Clinically NGF has not yet proved as valuable as originally hoped. Scientists were familiar with hormones: proteins made in a particular tissue and released into the blood system. The scepticism that had greeted Levi-Montalcini's early claims was understandable, Goedert adds. It proved beyond any doubt that NGF was physiologically essential for the functioning of the vertebrate nervous system”, Goedert explains. “When they injected anti-NGF antibody into newborn mice they found that the whole of the sympathetic nervous system was wiped out. The clinching demonstration of the importance of the newly discovered protein-a “beautiful experiment”, to use Goedert's adjective-came out of making antibodies against it. Equally fortuitous was her selection of a colleague, biochemist Stanley Cohen, who went on to share the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with her for their discovery of growth factors. She set out on a quest to purify this factor.” In trying to isolate it she had several strokes of luck, including the choice of an experimental model that depended on grafting mouse tumour cells into chick embryos. “She postulated instead that under normal circumstances something is produced to prevent nerve cells from dying. “Rita's interpretation was different from Hamburger's, and she turned out to be right”, says Michel Goedert of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. ![]() ![]() Levi-Montalcini repeated his experiments using a silver-staining technique to examine the nerves. ![]() He drew the reasonable conclusion that this represented the loss of some attractive factor which would have been released by the tissue to be innervated. Hamburger had shown that removing the limbs of chick embryos interfered with the growth of the nerves that were intended to innervate them. It was the repetition of Hamburger's chick experiments that led to the discovery of NGF. The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific.The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia.The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology.
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