Rita Levi-Montalcini 102 Died

Rita Levi-Montalcini has left the building by vaughanbell Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini has passed away at the age of 103, just a few months after publishing her last scientific study. She won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of nerve growth factoralong with her colleague Stanley Cohen and continued worked well past the time when most people would have retired. Her most recent scientific study was published earlier this year, at the age of 102, and extended the work for which she won the Nobel. If you want more background on a fantastic neuroscientist and her ground-breaking work, Nature published a profile in 2009, on her 100th birthday. Link to obituary in the New York Times. Link to Nature profile. vaughanbell | December 31, 2012 at 12:39 pm | Categories: Inside the Brain, Remembering | URL: http://wp.me/ptsTD-6B9 Levi-Montalcini: A Giant of Neuroscience Leaves a Living Legacy By Gary Stix | December 30, 2012 |   Share  Email  Print What may have been Rita Levi-Montalcini’s last paper was published almost a year ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By no means a retrospective of a career that produced a Nobel Prize, the paper (“Nerve growth factor regulates axial rotation during early stages of chick embryo development”) added still one more bit of knowledge about the protein involved with  the growth and survival of nerve cells, a molecule that was Levi-Montalcini’s passion for 60 years.