A Small Woman with a Regal Bearing

Finally some good news, in the endless stream of indifferent or bad news! Finally a moment of pure joy, not simple joy but many-faceted and complex. Joy because, after so many years, the world’s most highly desired prize in medicine has gone to a woman. Because it has gone to a Turinese. Because this Turinese honors me with her friendship. And finally, but most important, because the Nobel fits Rita like a glove.

Indeed, by custom and by statute, it rewards a life productively dedicated to science, but it comes this time into the hands of a small woman, with an indomitable will and regal bearing, who, on the path she chose many years ago, is still traveling with intelligent energy, and with that rare combination of patience and impatience which belongs to great innovators.

But Rita Levi-Montalcini is in no way in the sunset of her career: for her the Nobel comes not only to crown past achievements. Even today, amid endless difficulties of every sort, including domestic, her activity is intense and unceasing. Rita not only works in the laboratory but pursues colleagues, students, and worthy followers, writes her long awaited memoirs, travels around the world to expound to scientists and non-scientists alike the profound meaning of her discoveries.

It’s not for me to judge them, but I believe I have understood their groundbreaking quality: valuable in themselves, and recognized by friends and competitors, they are also creative, a barrier broken down, a passageway through which other light will shine, for the ultimate purpose of alleviating suffering and allowing us to approach, step by step, the most fleeting and enviable goal, that of the human mind that understands itself.

La Stampa, October 14, 1986