LEVI-MONTALCINI & MC CLINTOCK – Nobel Prize Winners in Physiology and Medicine

Rita Levi-Montalcini, (born April 22, 1909, Turin, Italy—died December 30, 2012, Rome), Italian American neurologist who, with biochemist Stanley Cohen, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1986 for her discovery of a bodily substance that stimulates and influences the growth of nerve cells. FOR MORE

Rita Levi-Montalcini began her scientific career in danger, as a Jew in Fascist Italy. She ended it in triumph, as the neuroembryologist who co-discovered nerve growth factor, a prominent figure in Italian politics, and an active researcher and mentor until her death at the age of 103. FOR MORE

Barbara McClintock, (born June 16, 1902, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died September 2, 1992, Huntington, New York), American scientist whose discovery in the 1940s and ’50s of mobile genetic elements, or “jumping genes,” won her the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983. FOR MORE

Barbara McClintock was born June 16, 1902, in Hartford, Connecticut, one of four children of Thomas Henry McClintock and Sara Handy McClintock. Her family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1908. She graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1919. McClintock earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in botany at Cornell University, and received her Ph.D. in the same subject at Cornell in 1927. Although women were not permitted to major in genetics at Cornell, she became a highly influential member of a small group who studied maize (corn) cytogenetics, the genetic study of maize at the cellular level. FOR MORE

22 pioneering women in science history you really should know about  

Photo Credit: Women in Science at Harvard