Slashdot Mirror
Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, Nobel Winner, Dies At 103
SternisheFan writes "Nobel winner Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, who discovered chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerves, has died. She was 103. From the article: 'Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neurologist who discovered critical chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerve networks, opening the way for the study of how those processes can go wrong in diseases like dementia and cancer, died on Sunday at her home in Rome. She was 103. Her death was announced by Mayor Gianni Alemanno of Rome. "I don't use these words easily, but her work revolutionized the study of neural development, from how we think about it to how we intervene," said Dr. Gerald D. Fishbach, a neuroscientist and professor emeritus at Columbia. Scientists had virtually no idea how embryo cells built a latticework of intricate connections to other cells when Dr. Levi-Montalcini began studying chicken embryos in the bedroom of her house in Turin, Italy, during World War II. After years of obsessive study, much of it at Washington University in St. Louis with Dr. Viktor Hamburger, she found a protein that, when released by cells, attracted nerve growth from nearby developing cells.'"
An amazing woman... http://m.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/rita-levi-montalcini-nobel-prize-winning-neuroscientist-dies-at-103/2012/12/30/054829e0-5295-11e2-a613-ec8d394535c6_story.html p
I am wondering if I actually got the first post nine whole minutes after this stor was published. Is this discrimination against women on slashdot? Just wondering cause the half life of a new story before comments is usually about one minute.
Best name ever! I wish to god that was my name. I'd love to see the look on people's faces as they tried to decide whether I was yanking their chain or not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini#Early_life_and_education
Does anyone know if this is going down over the last decades as asian-pacific/developing world get more prizes ?
NGF (nerve growth factor) and related growth factors.
The article's summary is literally bullshit spewed from talking heads
I think 'Anonymous' should win the Nobel peace prize; after all, Obama won it, and the Europian Union won it, and it would quickly humble Obama and the E.U. where that prize is concerned.
besides, it's the only way Nobel can redeem themselves for those two major mistakes.
Are you suggesting some kind of jewish conspiracy, or just that apparently jews just seem to kick ass more often in things they attempt? Makes me wonder if i should convert....
Rest in Peace.
An incredible woman.
Giuseppe Levi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Levi http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=it&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fit.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FGiuseppe_Levi had 3 students who went on to win Nobel prizes. Biologists had been studying gross anatomy from before human history. In Levi's time, they had really good microscopes for 100 years, so they had extended that study to the tissues and cells of the organs. Levi extended that to understand the physiological mechanisms of those tissues. He could see that brain cells were growing, but how were they growing and why were they growing?
He assigned Rita Levi-Montalcini to figure out how the brain developed. It was an impossible problem, so she did what scientists often do and attacked a simpler problem: How does a nerve cell develop? She finally found a factor that caused it to grow. Now we have more growth factors than you could cover in an hour's biology class.
Levi's second student, Salvador Luria, wound up studying bacteriophages, the viruses that attack bacteria. He (they, really -- these were collective efforts) found out that some bacteria was resistant to viruses. It turned out that the mechanism of resistance was restriction enzymes that would chop the DNA or RNA of viruses at particular sequences that were found in the viruses but not in the bacteria themselves. This turned out to be a fantastically useful tool for studying DNA and RNA. Grad students use it every day.
Levi's third student, Renato Dulbecco, discovered a virus that turned cells cancerous. It turned out that very few human cancers are caused by viruses, but the study of that one example of how cells become cancerous through viruses helped to unravel the whole mechanism of cancer. One of his contributions was to the technique of growing cells, and you can read medical reports today that cells were grown in Dulbecco's medium. During WWII, Dulbecco joined the Resistance against the Nazis.
Another Italian Nobel laureate in that group, but not a student of Levi's, was Mario Capecchi. Capecci had a hard childhood during WWII. His father was drafted to fight in North Africa as an anti-aircraft gunner, but he was lost in combat. His mother was an American, the daughter of an American artist and a German archaeologist, but like most of this bunch she was a Communist, and they sent her to Dachau. She had made provision for a peasant family to take care of Mario, but that fell apart and he wound up at the age of 4 on the streets, like in one of those post-war Italian movies. After the war, his mother got out of Dachau, and found him in a hospital. Finally, his mother's brother, who was a physicist at RCA, found them and brought them to America, where Mario finally got his education.
Mario Capecchi was playing around with the repair mechanisms of DNA, which are subverted by viruses, and figured out how to use them to knock out a single gene in mice (or any animals). If you know any biology, you understand how useful this was. Today, when a researcher finds a mutation responsible for a disease the routine thing he does is to create a knockout mouse to see what happens without that gene. It's like having an on/off switch to see what happens when you turn a gene on and off.
After Capecchi won the Nobel prize in 2008, his half-sister in Austria recognized him as her long-lost brother.
Those Italian biologists were an interesting bunch, and they lived in dramatic times.
There have been studies into this. Normally studies to determine whether one genetically similar group (race, ethnicity, etc) has a predisposition towards advantages in intelligence, athletics, etc. has been looked down upon and stifled. But as studies into hereditary illnesses progressed, it turns out that some illnesses bring advantages. For example, sickle cell anemia brings a resistance to malaria. Another example is Tay-Sachs, a debilitating neurological disorder that usually brings about childhood death and is more common amongst Ashkenazi Jewish persons, however carriers of a Tay Sachs gene without the disease have an average of a couple IQ points bump.
A couple IQ points is nothing tremendous, mind you. The average Tay-Sachs carrier is going to be just as average as everyone else, but on the high end of the normal curve, you'll find there will be an over-representation of Jews to the other ethnicities. This may explain in some part the effect you've seen. It should also be noted that there is a large many Jewish Nobel Prize Laureates and other persons of note who do not share the faith (Einstein, Feynman, Asimov, Edward Teller, etc), so conversion will only likely fill your mind with things that bring no value towards life successes.
Here's a Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence
*ducks*
I read this, and am absolutely amazed and impressed at her brilliance. She really was a credit to the human race in general as so many of the Nobel Prize winners have been historically.
And then I see that our President got a Nobel for what, again?
-Styopa
...who I am not totally ashamed of... is a true, incommensurable loss.
That's because you're not fulfilling your manhood by living in Israel.
http://www.evcomics.com/2008/05/29/israel-man-and-diaspora-boy/
(Warning: Jewish humor)
By the way, if you think that's funny, be sure to read the propaganda magazine he's parodying it and you'll really appreciate the jokes. It's like The Great Dictator/Triumph of the Will
http://www.shoah.org.uk/2011/01/16/beyond-satir-captain-israhell-fights-the-snake-of-bds/
Actually, one of the things that struck me about the life of Rita Levi-Montalcini and her circle was that so many of them were Italian Jews who had married Italian Christians and vice versa. They were atheists and socialists or Communists, and many of them fought in the resistance.
One of my childhood heroes was Enrico Fermi, whose wife, Laura, was Jewish.
You seem to be referring to this argument about Tay-Sachs carriers http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html?pagewanted=all As this article, and the Wikipedia article, points out, the argument has just enough evidence behind it to be intriguing, but not yet enough evidence to be convincing.
I once had a psychology textbook that was written in the 1950s. It was full of bell curves of Negro IQs, white IQs, and Jewish IQs. The Negro IQ curves were 15 points to the left of the white curves, and the Jewish curves were 15 points to the right of the white curves. Data like this led Charles Murray to conclude that Negroes were just plain genetically inferior, although, Murray hastened to add, they did have those mental skills that were useful in the jungles of Africa. So it's futile to try to bring Negroes up to the intellectual accomplishments of white people, Murray argued in the Wall Street Journal, and affirmative action will merely make them frustrated and unhappy. So the lower educational accomplishments of Negroes wasn't due to the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow, it wasn't due to the segregated schools where Negroes got textbooks after they were thrown out by white schools, where Negroes were taught how to be carpenters while white students were taught how to be lawyers. Negroes just didn't have the genes for intelligence that like white men did. And, as Charles Murray liked to say, they didn't have the genes like "you guys," the Jews.
I was not very comfortable with these theories, which were not confirmed by later examination.
In fact, I work in biology today, and my own favorite biology teacher, who taught me the important ideas in genetics that I use today, was a black woman. It would be the height of ingratitude for me to tolerate racism towards her children and grandchildren after all she gave me. And I've met a lot of black kids who were smarter than me, particularly in the sciences, which leads me (and a lot of other people) to suspect that Murray must have dropped a decimal point, or has a screw loose, somewhere.
In my understanding, most geneticists are ready to believe that about half of intelligence is due to environment, and half due to genetics. In countries like Finland, which is probably the most egalitarian society in the world, everybody gets a relatively equal educational environment, so much of the variation could be due to genetics. But in countries like the U.S., which is one of the most unequal countries in the world, the effect of environment washes out any genetic effect. At least 20 points of IQ is due to the environment. In the US, and in much of Europe, the Jews are an affluent, successful minority, http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/images/cartoon.jpg particularly in the scientific professions, so it's understandable that they would be winning Nobel prizes disproportionately. It may turn out that Jewish success is entirely environmental.
But these Italian scientists, and their political inspirations like Rosa Luxemburg, said that it's time to put our ethnic identities and religious superstitions behind us, and build a socialist society where everyone -- Jew, Christian, African and everyone else -- will be educated and contribute to their fullest potential.
I never read any book about it like you have, but I always had a gut feeling that the average jew is smarter than the average caucasian, and the average caucasian is smarter than the average black person.
I don't want to be a racist and insult all black people, just like you have, I have met some admirable black people in my life.
Who’s the greatest Jewish Jock of all time? The strongest (and most screamingly obvious) case can be made for Sandy Koufax. His image and career come very close to perfection. It helps that he retired before we could witness him at less than full strength. (In his final season, he won 27 times, each of them a complete game!) And his decision to sit out Yom Kippur—and the applause he received for it—certified Jewish assimilation in this country. I can also make a case for Benny Leonard, the greatest of the Jewish pugilists. He won the lightweight title in 1917 and didn't let it go until 1925. The authoritative Bert Sugar (also a Jew) has rated him the sixth best pound-for-pound fighter of all time—just one spot below Muhammad Ali. http://mobile.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2012/10/jewish_jocks_franklin_foer_on_his_new_book_about_the_greatest_jewish_athletes.html?original_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fhl%3Den%26gl%3DUS%26ie%3DUTF-8%26source%3Dandroid-browser%26q%3Dmovie%2Bairplane%252C%2Bjewish%2Batheletes
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
A lot less was understood about humanity in the 1950's. Backward ideas abounded then, and racism skewed studies published in that era. Why trust studies performed over 60 years ago to be fair and un-tainted by then-accepted ideas? We now know that we are all the same, basically. People with a darker skin color have more melanin (natural reaction to sunlight) than lighter color skinned people. Human migration out of Africa into more northern, colder climates, meant those people wore more clothes to keep warm, blocking off the sunlight. It's just skin pigmentation, look at pics of the now infamous 'tanning mom'. People are people, regardless of skin tone, or where their more recent ancestors lived. 10,000 years ago we all lived in Africa, and DNA tests have shown the entire human race derived from a handful of women, 11 is the number I've heard. The cultural differences are the only things that have kept us apart, and the world's a much differnt place today, thanks largely due to freedom of knowledge and information of the internet.
Today, ignorance is all that seperates us.
She and her twin sister were featured in the 1995 science documentary Death by Design/The Life and Times of Life and Times, which is well worth viewing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_Design/The_Life_and_Times_of_Life_and_Times
Those studies were done 60 years ago because no sane scientist would dare to conduct such a study today.
If you think about it, there are other differences between races, its not just the skin color. Some diseases affect more, or exclusively one race. African descendants tend to have a better muscle tone and to be better at sports.