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2009-04-20 04:28:44
Sat Apr 18, 6:32 pm ET
ROME Rita Levi Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said Saturday
that even though she is about to turn 100, her mind is sharper than it was she
when she was 20.
Levi Montalcini, who also serves as a senator for life in Italy, celebrates her
100th birthday on Wednesday, and she spoke at a ceremony held in her honor by
the European Brain Research Institute.
She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American Stanley Cohen for
discovering mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs.
"At 100, I have a mind that is superior thanks to experience than when I
was 20," she told the party, complete with a large cake for her.
The Turin-born Levi Montalcini recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s
under Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do
research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home.
"Above all, don't fear difficult moments," she said. "The best comes from
them."
"I should thank Mussolini for having declared me to be of an inferior race.
This led me to the joy of working, not any more unfortunately, in university
institutes but in a bedroom," the scientist said.
Her white hair elegantly coifed and wearing a smart navy blue suit, she raised
a glass of sparkling wine in a toast to her long life.