Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, Nobel Winner, Dies At 103 36
A reader writes "Nobel winner Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, who discovered chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerves, has died. She was 103. From the article: 'Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neurologist who discovered critical chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerve networks, opening the way for the study of how those processes can go wrong in diseases like dementia and cancer, died on Sunday at her home in Rome. She was 103. Her death was announced by Mayor Gianni Alemanno of Rome. "I don't use these words easily, but her work revolutionized the study of neural development, from how we think about it to how we intervene," said Dr. Gerald D. Fishbach, a neuroscientist and professor emeritus at Columbia. Scientists had virtually no idea how embryo cells built a latticework of intricate connections to other cells when Dr. Levi-Montalcini began studying chicken embryos in the bedroom of her house in Turin, Italy, during World War II. After years of obsessive study, much of it at Washington University in St. Louis with Dr. Viktor Hamburger, she found a protein that, when released by cells, attracted nerve growth from nearby developing cells.'"
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Rita, you left a truly wonderful mark on this world. May you rest in peace.
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20% of nobel prize are jewish.. 0.2% of population (Score:1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini#Early_life_and_education
Does anyone know if this is going down over the last decades as asian-pacific/developing world get more prizes ?
Re:20% of nobel prize are jewish.. 0.2% of populat (Score:4, Interesting)
A couple IQ points is nothing tremendous, mind you. The average Tay-Sachs carrier is going to be just as average as everyone else, but on the high end of the normal curve, you'll find there will be an over-representation of Jews to the other ethnicities. This may explain in some part the effect you've seen. It should also be noted that there is a large many Jewish Nobel Prize Laureates and other persons of note who do not share the faith (Einstein, Feynman, Asimov, Edward Teller, etc), so conversion will only likely fill your mind with things that bring no value towards life successes.
Here's a Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence [wikipedia.org]
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That's because you're not fulfilling your manhood by living in Israel.
http://www.evcomics.com/2008/05/29/israel-man-and-diaspora-boy/ [evcomics.com]
(Warning: Jewish humor)
By the way, if you think that's funny, be sure to read the propaganda magazine he's parodying it and you'll really appreciate the jokes. It's like The Great Dictator/Triumph of the Will
http://www.shoah.org.uk/2011/01/16/beyond-satir-captain-israhell-fights-the-snake-of-bds/ [shoah.org.uk]
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Actually, one of the things that struck me about the life of Rita Levi-Montalcini and her circle was that so many of them were Italian Jews who had married Italian Christians and vice versa. They were atheists and socialists or Communists, and many of them fought in the resistance.
One of my childhood heroes was Enrico Fermi, whose wife, Laura, was Jewish.
You seem to be referring to this argument about Tay-Sachs carriers http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html?pagewanted=all [nytimes.com] As this article, an
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I never read any book about it like you have, but I always had a gut feeling that the average jew is smarter than the average caucasian, and the average caucasian is smarter than the average black person.
I don't want to be a racist and insult all black people, just like you have, I have met some admirable black people in my life.
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Giuseppe Levi (Score:5, Informative)
Giuseppe Levi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Levi [wikipedia.org] http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=it&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fit.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FGiuseppe_Levi [google.com] had 3 students who went on to win Nobel prizes. Biologists had been studying gross anatomy from before human history. In Levi's time, they had really good microscopes for 100 years, so they had extended that study to the tissues and cells of the organs. Levi extended that to understand the physiological mechanisms of those tissues. He could see that brain cells were growing, but how were they growing and why were they growing?
He assigned Rita Levi-Montalcini to figure out how the brain developed. It was an impossible problem, so she did what scientists often do and attacked a simpler problem: How does a nerve cell develop? She finally found a factor that caused it to grow. Now we have more growth factors than you could cover in an hour's biology class.
Levi's second student, Salvador Luria, wound up studying bacteriophages, the viruses that attack bacteria. He (they, really -- these were collective efforts) found out that some bacteria was resistant to viruses. It turned out that the mechanism of resistance was restriction enzymes that would chop the DNA or RNA of viruses at particular sequences that were found in the viruses but not in the bacteria themselves. This turned out to be a fantastically useful tool for studying DNA and RNA. Grad students use it every day.
Levi's third student, Renato Dulbecco, discovered a virus that turned cells cancerous. It turned out that very few human cancers are caused by viruses, but the study of that one example of how cells become cancerous through viruses helped to unravel the whole mechanism of cancer. One of his contributions was to the technique of growing cells, and you can read medical reports today that cells were grown in Dulbecco's medium. During WWII, Dulbecco joined the Resistance against the Nazis.
Another Italian Nobel laureate in that group, but not a student of Levi's, was Mario Capecchi. Capecci had a hard childhood during WWII. His father was drafted to fight in North Africa as an anti-aircraft gunner, but he was lost in combat. His mother was an American, the daughter of an American artist and a German archaeologist, but like most of this bunch she was a Communist, and they sent her to Dachau. She had made provision for a peasant family to take care of Mario, but that fell apart and he wound up at the age of 4 on the streets, like in one of those post-war Italian movies. After the war, his mother got out of Dachau, and found him in a hospital. Finally, his mother's brother, who was a physicist at RCA, found them and brought them to America, where Mario finally got his education.
Mario Capecchi was playing around with the repair mechanisms of DNA, which are subverted by viruses, and figured out how to use them to knock out a single gene in mice (or any animals). If you know any biology, you understand how useful this was. Today, when a researcher finds a mutation responsible for a disease the routine thing he does is to create a knockout mouse to see what happens without that gene. It's like having an on/off switch to see what happens when you turn a gene on and off.
After Capecchi won the Nobel prize in 2008, his half-sister in Austria recognized him as her long-lost brother.
Those Italian biologists were an interesting bunch, and they lived in dramatic times.
standards have fallen, just a bit (Score:1)
I read this, and am absolutely amazed and impressed at her brilliance. She really was a credit to the human race in general as so many of the Nobel Prize winners have been historically.
And then I see that our President got a Nobel for what, again?
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And then I see that our President got a Nobel for what, again?
For being black, d'uh.
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And then I see that our President got a Nobel for what, again?
For being black, d'uh.
No, it was for not being George W Bush.
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Death by Design (1995) (Score:1)
She and her twin sister were featured in the 1995 science documentary Death by Design/The Life and Times of Life and Times, which is well worth viewing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_Design/The_Life_and_Times_of_Life_and_Times [wikipedia.org]