Italian senator and scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini (left), the world's oldest living Nobel laureate, turns 100 on Wednesday vowing to remain a political force in her country. --PHOTO: AP
ROME - ITALIAN senator and scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini, the world's oldest living Nobel laureate, turns 100 on Wednesday vowing to remain a political force in her country.
Hard of hearing and nearly blind, she is the grand old lady of the Senate, where she became senator for life in 2001, an honour bestowed on former presidents and prominent figures in social, scientific, artistic or literary fields.
Background
BORN into a wealthy Jewish intellectual family in northern Turin in 1909, Ms Montalcini was the daughter of an engineer and an artist whom she described in her Nobel autobiography as 'an exquisite human being.' She had a twin sister Paola, who died in 2000. Her brother Gino and older sister Anna have also died.
Overcoming her father's resistance to the idea of a professional career for a woman, Ms Levi-Montalcini entered medical school in Turin aged 20. She then shunned marriage and motherhood to devote herself to a medical career.
In 2007 she cut short a trip to Dubai to help then-prime minister Romano Prodi survive a confidence vote. Later, she helped the 2008 budget squeak through the upper house.
Ms Levi-Montalcini has vowed to continue exercising her 'right and duty' to vote alongside elected senators despite her age and sniping from elements of the right.
'The body may die but the messages that we have sent in life remain. Mine is 'believe in values',' she said at an early birthday party hosted on Monday by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.
The president praised her as a 'dear friend, a great woman of science and of exemplary civic virtues.' The neurologist and developmental biologist shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 1986 with colleague Stanley Cohen for their ground-breaking discovery of growth factors.
The Nobel committee cited the pair for advancing 'our knowledge from a stage when ... growth factors were unknown, to a situation today when the role of growth factors in cell proliferation, organ differentiation, and tumour transformation is generally recognised.'
Their work has helped understanding of such disorders as cancer, birth defects and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
Ms Levi-Montalcini's latest honour was France's Legion d'Honneur, which she received in December last year.
Enjoying great affection and respect in Italy, she intervened to defend the teaching of evolution in schools when, in 2004, the then education minister, Letizia Moratti, wanted to remove it from school curricula.
Ms Levi-Montalcini was the first woman president of the Italian Encyclopaedia and a member of several prestigious scientific societies including the Italian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences in the United States and London's Royal Society. -- AFP
