NOBEL. Symposium on the Nerve Growth Factor

New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1964. First edition.

1964 SCARCE PROCEEDINGS OF NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES SYMPOSIUM ON NERVE GROWTH FACTOR, LED BY NOBELIST LEVI-MONTALCINI.

15x23 cm pamphlet with printed paper covers, stapled, [2], pp 149 - 231, many black & white illustrations. Light browning to pages, very good in custom archival polyethylene covers. This offprint contains the papers presented as a symposium before the Section of Biological and Medical Sciences of the New York Academy of Sciences on February 11, 1963. Pages 149-170 contain Levi-Montalcini's paper.

RITA LEVI-MONTALCINI (1909 - 2012) is a Nobel Laureate honored for her work in neurobiology. While she was at the University of Turin, the neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi sparked her interest in the developing nervous system. After graduating summa cum laude M.D. in 1936, Levi-Montalcini remained at the university as Levi's assistant, but her academic career was cut short by Benito Mussolini's 1938 Manifesto of Race and the subsequent introduction of laws barring Jews from academic and professional careers. During World War II, Levi-Montalcini set up a laboratory in her bedroom in Turin and studied the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos, discovering that nerve cells die when they lack targets, and laying the groundwork for much of her later research. In September 1946, Levi-Montalcini was granted a one-semester research fellowship in the laboratory of Professor Viktor Hamburger at Washington University School of Medicine; he was interested in two of the articles Levi-Montalcini had published in foreign scientific journals. After she duplicated the results of her home laboratory experiments, Hamburger offered her a research associate position, which she held for 30 years. It was there that, in 1952, she did her most important work: isolating nerve growth factor from observations of certain cancerous tissues that cause extremely rapid growth of nerve cells. This crucial finding in biology identified NGF as the main protein responsible for the growth of neurons within the nervous system, allowing for major advances in research. From 1961 to 1969, she directed the Research Center of Neurobiology of the National Research Council, and from 1969 to 1978, the Laboratory of Cellular Biology. Levi-Montalcini earned a Nobel Prize along with Stanley Cohen in 1986 in the physiology or medicine category. The two earned their Nobel Prizes for their research into the nerve growth factor.