On 10 December 198, at the concert hall in Stockholm, Rita Levi Montalcini receives the Nobel Prize for the medina, together with her colleague and fellow student Stanley Cohen, for the discoveries on the nerve growth factor (here the video with the moment of delivery ). The second Italian woman to receive this recognition; the first, sixty years earlier, had been the writer Grazia Deledda, for Literature. The award to Rita Levi Montalcini was very different: the first to an Italian woman in a scientific subject.
That day he gave a short speech (complete and translated here) all centered on gratitude for the recognition of his work. But the words he had pronounced a few weeks earlier, on October 13, are to be remembered: “Rita Levi Montalcini he was reading an Agatha Christie mystery when the phone rang. An anonymous and unexpected call from Stockholm announces her winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine, together with biochemist Stanley Cohen, collaborator and colleague with whom she shared the research started in Turin and continued at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri “.
The professor will say that day: “The Nobel prize will not change my life. I will continue to work as I always have. And I will donate the proceeds to charity and to help young scholars in neurobiology “. So he did. She was 77 that day and continued working until the end of her days, when she was 103. When she turned 100, I sent writer Paolo Giordano to interview her for the first cover of Wired Italy. A historical cover for at least two factors: the Albert Watson post photo produced by David Moretti with a layer made of silver; and the phrase that the professor had said to Giordano, shown on the cover as a slogan: “I lost my sight a little, my hearing a lot. I don’t see projections at conferences and I don’t hear well. But I think more now than when I was twenty. The body does what it wants. I am not the body: I am the mind “.
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