Question 1

True or false: Levi-Montalcini lived to be 103 years old and remained active in research until her death.

Accepted Answer

True. Born in 1909, she died in 2012 at age 103, and she continued working at her institute almost daily into her 100s.

Question 2

True or false: Her father initially refused to let her attend university, wanting her to be a wife and mother.

Accepted Answer

True. Her father believed women should not pursue careers, but she insisted and eventually enrolled in medical school with his reluctant permission.

Question 3

True or false: Rita Levi-Montalcini was forced to build a secret laboratory in her bedroom during WWII.

Accepted Answer

True. Because of Mussolini's laws barring Jews from academia, she set up a makeshift lab in her bedroom to continue her research on nerve growth.

Question 4

True or false: She won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA.

Accepted Answer

False. She won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering nerve growth factor (NGF), not DNA.

Question 5

True or false: She isolated nerve growth factor from snake venom and mouse tumors.

Accepted Answer

True. Her key experiments used mouse sarcoma tumors and later snake venom, which is rich in NGF, to isolate and understand the growth factor.

Question 6

True or false: Levi-Montalcini was a close friend of Albert Einstein and collaborated with him on nerve regeneration.

Accepted Answer

False. Although she admired Einstein, they never collaborated; she did work with Viktor Hamburger, a different scientist, on nerve growth.

Question 7

True or false: Levi-Montalcini was a twin, and her sister became a famous painter.

Accepted Answer

False. She had a twin sister named Paola, but Paola was a renowned artist and sculptor, not primarily a painter.

Question 8

True or false: She was the first woman ever appointed to the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Accepted Answer

False. She was indeed appointed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, but she was not the first woman—that was biochemist Gertrude Cori.

Rita Levi-Montalcini Trivia Questions