When celebrations began last week in view of her 100th birthday today, Rita Levi-Montalcini was asked if there ever was a dark period in her life.
“None!” she answered.
Not even when, coming from a wealthy Jewish intellectual family in Turin, the Fascist government of the times barred her from continuing her medical studies, she said that was a most fertile period.
It was from her home laboratory where she was forced to work that the kernel of what was to become the ground breaking discovery on nerve growth which won her, together with Stanley Cohen, the Nobel Prize in 1986, was formed. This work has led to better understanding of cancer, birth defects, Alzheimer and Parkinson’s diseases.
If this was a fable there would be a moral and the moral of this story, she added, I believe to be:
“Even the evil men do, God transform into good.”
And
“God knows better than we what is best for us.”
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