Resources related to the article A Lab of Her Own about Rita Levi-Montalcini, published online in Nautilus in Dec 2021 and in print in Feb 2022
Creative nonfiction writers generally need to present to their editors this kind of evidence for what they're writing. For transparency and specifically so that anyone interested can know what evidence sparked specific statements I made in the article, here's a list of sources. The detective work involved in finding key nuggets of info like these is one of the hardest and yet most fun tasks involved in this kind of writing.
  • The Nautilus article online
  • Curio Podcast of the Nautilus article being read, bookended by Gillian Anderson's comments about the article and Levi-Montalcini.
  • The opening "cold, dry Tuesday in December": Date and details of this story are from the book "La clessidra della vita di Rita Levi-Montalcini", and weather is from the European Climate Assessment & Dataset https://www.ecad.eu/ [The weather details from ECA&D for Dec 10 1940: low 1.1C, high 6.6C, precipitation 0.0mm in Milan, no precipitation that week]. Milan had weather records at ECA&D, Turin did not. La Stampa newspaper does not have weather records then for Turin either. About the location in Milan: Wolfgang Wimmer, Senior Manager Corporate Archives responded to an email question from me that "In 1940 ZEISS had a representation (La Meccaoptica) at the Corso Italia 8 in Milan" but that there were also dealers in Milan. The Dec 18/19 bombing of Milan hit Viale Col di Lana, less than a mile from Corso Italia 8, but I didn't mention here how close the microscope purchase site was to the bombing the following week because I couldn't be sure that she bought the microscope at La Meccaoptica.
  • All of the Turin bombing and siren details are from a few sources: Museo Torino's web site and images of damage and alarm cards (on which alarm timings, bombings and daylight hours each day are drawn out in graph form: search "allarme" here to see them all: https://www.museotorino.it/site/media/photos/search), from this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Turin_in_World_War_II and I verified extant sources listed in the Wikipedia article at the time, and from the Bomber Command War Diaries book (Middlebrook M, Everitt C, 1985, Viking) detailing day by day the planes sent out from Britain and the targets they hit. A copy of one of the alarm cards, from Nov 1942: www.dropbox.com/s/89mj6vmpxyuyt4y/Nov1942FromMuseoTorino.png?dl=0
  • Italian race laws, 1938: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_racial_laws#/media/File:Corriere_testata_1938.jpg and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_racial_laws#/media/File:Difesa_della_Razza.jpg and https://www-braidense-it.translate.goog/memoria2009/epurazione.php?_x_tr_sch=http&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US
  • Excerpts of Rita's letters from Belgium are from the book Rita Levi-Montalcini e il suo Maestro, by Marco Piccolino, Piera Levi-Montalcini, Maria Gattone Levi-Montalcini, Michele Luzzati, Alberto Cavaglion, Giacomo Magrini, Isabel Murray, Pietro Calissano. Edizioni ETS 2021 and from the article "Rita Levi-Montalcini’s first intellectual emigration and her research in the laboratory “à la Robinson Crusoe”: the letters from Brussels and a “Wiggish” recollection" by Marco Piccolino, Conf. Cephalal. et Neurol. 2021; Vol. 31, N. 2: e2021016.
  • Description of the inside of the Turin Apartment is from interview with Piera Levi-Montalcini in Asti, 22 April 2018, and recent photos she shared by email afterwards.
  • Early bombings of Turin and blackouts: see Museo Torino web site (https://www.museotorino.it/view/s/c7a52f02c7c74ff2896f666d0a1e010d and https://www.museotorino.it/view/s/acb7d7d49d6147e188377fb9e9c491ef) and Italian society under Anglo-American bombs: propaganda, experience, and legend, 1940–1945, C. Baldoli and M. Fincardi 2009, The Historical Journal 52(4):1017-1038. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X09990380 and Storia di Torino VIII Dalla Grande guerra alla Liberazione (1915-1945), a cura di Nicola Tranfaglia
  • Bedroom set-up is from Rita Levi-Montalcini's Cronologia di una scoperta book and her autobiography In Praise of Imperfection. About "an egg incubator that her brother built with a thermostat and a fan," I found in different sources statements that he built either the egg incubator or a temperature-controlled case that surrounded the dissection microscope.
  • The textbooks I examined were:
    • Principles of Neural Development, 1985, by Purves and Lichtman
    • Development of the Nervous System, 4th edition, 2019, by Dan Sanes, Thomas Reh, William Harris, Matthias Landgraf
    • Developmental Neurobiology, 2018, by Lynne M. Bianchi
    • Building Brains: An Introduction to Neural Development, 2nd edition, 2018, by Price DJ, Jarman AP, Mason JO, Kind PC
    • Principles of Neural Science, Fifth Edition, 2012, by Eric Kandel et al.
    • Fundamental Neuroscience, 4th edition, 2012, by L. Squire et al.
    • and most surprising to me was Marcus Jacobson's Developmental Neurobiology, 3rd edition, 1991, which is a large, detailed, historical treatment of the field and includes a 214-page reference section (with about 8000 papers referenced by my estimate), but Levi-Montalcini's wartime papers are not cited.
  • My translation of the 1942 paper with some notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B6-kmhmyw-uWthw40fwsbRvAu4FO3qJyi1GMazS8o-g/edit?usp=sharing
  • My partial translation of the 1944 paper with some notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1um6fT9VJ8zZ-hlqfjlF6laBWw3ClsDIaBSLO6Z7L5fs/edit?usp=sharing Note: this was her next article on this topic but not her next chronologically.
  • Viktor Hamburger's 1934 article: Hamburger V (1934) The effects of wing bud extirpation on the development of the central nervous system in chick embryos. J Exp Zool 68:449-494. doi.org/10.1002/jez.1400680305
  • The description of the view from the train car is from Rita Levi-Montalcini's "One of Hans Spemann's pupils", 1981, in Studies in Developmental Neurobiology: Essays in Honor of Viktor Hamburger, edited by W. Maxwell Cowan. Here and throughout the writing, for details that are known already, I tried to present detail that is at least less widely known (corn and poppies, rather than the smell of the hay for example) – so that this article would complement rather than duplicate widely-read sources like her autobiography.
  • The earlier researchers referred to when presenting Hamburger's work are covered by the Hamburger 1934 paper and the Detwiler 1936 book "Neuroembryology: An Experimental Study" (MacMillan, New York). Both give thorough reviews of many earlier limb experiments on chick and amphibian embryos.
  • My list of Rita Levi-Montalcini's early papers, collated from many sources: https://www.dropbox.com/s/90glsvn07um6r8r/EarlyLeviMontalciniPubs.pdf?dl=0
  • "struck by the clarity of Hamburger’s writing" is based on "One of Hans Spemann's pupils" by Rita Levi-Montalcini, 1981, in Studies in Developmental Neurobiology: Essays in Honor of Viktor Hamburger, edited by W. Maxwell Cowan.
  • Path to cellars via courtyard and two sets of stairs is from interview with Piera Levi-Montalcini in Asti, 22 April 2018, who said, "The air-raid shelter was at 10, though. The shelter was underneath number 10, toward Via San Quintino, on the other side.... They would run downstairs through the courtyard. While the neighbors at 10 would go straight to the cellar."
  • "Levi-Montalcini must have left the apartment frequently to buy chicken eggs for the experiments, at times likely walking among bomb rubble." I used "must have" and "likely" intentionally here; I could find no sources documenting her source for eggs in Turin (her story of riding her bike to neighboring farms is from her time in Asti), and I presume she went out to buy them herself, but I can't exclude the possibility that someone brought her the eggs. I recall finding a source stating that rubble was common but was generally cleared quickly in Turin, but I can't find the source now (I'll add a source here if I find it).
  • Story explaining why eggs are often found already fertilized (only appearing in the print version of the story – Nautilus issue 41, Feb 2022): I visited Michael Bressan on 4/16/18 in his lab at UNC Chapel Hill.
  • Her patience with the experiments is from this interview: https://www.the-scientist.com/videos/discovery-against-all-odds-68222
  • I translated all direct quotes from papers written in French or Italian to English.
  • Dying nerve cells had been seen before by others (but not linked to loss of targets before Rita's experiments): For example: Beard J. (1896). The history of a transient nervous apparatus in certain Ichthyopsida. An account of the development and degeneration of ganglion cells and nerve fibers. Zool Jahrb 9: 319–426. See also the dissertation: Degeneration in Miniature: History of Cell Death and Aging Research in the Twentieth Century, by Lijing Jiang, Arizona State University (2013) https://repository.asu.edu/items/18823
  • I could not find Rita's research notes saved anywhere. I inferred the timing of completing and writing the work that's in the 1944 paper by the date when the 1944 paper was presented in the Pontifical Academy by an Academy member: 21 Feb 1943 (see translation of paper in link above). Work would have taken a while, plus writing the long paper, so it must have been well underway (or experiments and/or writing even fully completed? maybe even article submitted by mail by then?) before Rita left Turin near the end of 1942.
  • "despair" as the war began is from "I found him, as I was myself, in a state of despair because there was an awareness of the incumbent events." -Rita Levi-Montalcini, from her 1990 speech "Un ricordo di Giuseppe Moruzzi A formidable scientist and a formidable man" printed in the book "Giuseppe Moruzzi. Ritratti di uno scienziato - Portraits of a scientist" by Michel Meulders, Marco Piccolino, and Nicholas J. Wade.
  • I write of Rita Levi-Montalcini's experiments from home with Levi as Rita's work based on Rita's quotes about him assisting, his arrival soon after the experiments had started (Dec 1940 microscope purchase, Aug 1941 Levi arrives) and Levi having been unable to communicate from Belgium for a while (p. 93 of In Praise of Imperfection), and based on this kind of experiment not being the kind Levi was doing before (normal anatomy and its development being his focus). After I'd completed a draft of this article, Marco Piccolino published an excerpt of a 1959 letter from Levi where he wrote to Hamburger that his (Levi's) participation in the experiments was indeed "slight". Piccolino M. Conf Cephalal et Neurol 31(2)e2021016 2021.
  • Levi's experience in Belgium and return to Italy are from In Praise of Imperfection and from Family Lexicon by Levi's daughter Natalia Ginzburg.
  • Diary entry about bomb damage in November 1942 is from Il diario di Carlo Chevallard, www.museotorino.it/view/s/cc7d8256cb3541339f2899f9a57e25e7 See also Diari : gennaio 1940-febbraio 1944 by Emanuele Artom for description of Turin in Nov 1942 bombings, and video of damage, Torino. La città mutilata dalla R.A.F. (1942) from Cineteca MNC, from a film print held by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema: https://vimeo.com/156821670
  • I could not find any source that could pinpoint the exact date when Levi-Montalcini and family left Turin for Asti. Levi-Montalcini wrote in her autobiography, "when autumn was well underway" and "like the majority of people of Turin" – the latter would put it most likely between 21 Nov 1942 (people started evacuating after the Friday night bombing of 20/21 Nov - https://www.museotorino.it/view/s/cc7d8256cb3541339f2899f9a57e25e7) and ~Dec 3 – the day after Mussolini's speech recommended evacuation. In NGF: An uncharted route", 1992 (in The Neurosciences: Paths of Discovery, I, Editors Frederic G. Worden, Judith P. Swazey, George Adelman), Rita says she left "in July 1942" during heavy bombing of Turin, but this can't be correct, because Turin was not bombed that month, and heavy bombing occurred later, starting 18 November 1942.
  • Description of farm and where Rita stayed in the farmhouse and a nearby house during the war is from interview with Gino Montalcini and Piera Levi-Montalcini in Asti, 22 April 2018.
  • The mid-July 1943 bombing in Asti: From Nicoletta Fasano (historical researcher at Istituto per la Storia della Resistenza e nella Società Contemporanea in Provincia di Asti) by email, with my notes added: https://www.dropbox.com/s/h93h9yf4o08nvvl/16%20luglio%201943.pdf?dl=0 Fasano also sent me a spreadsheet of Asti alarms by date.
  • The cellars I visited (with Florian Jug and Gaia Pigino, who joined me on the trip and translated) were not connected to the ones under the apartment but must have looked almost identical to those under the apartment, because when we showed the photos to Piera, she thought they were photos of the cellars under the apartment
  • The St. Louis evenings of summer 1948 detail is from Rita Levi-Montalcini (1981) "One of Hans Spemann's pupils." in Studies in Developmental Neurobiology. Essays in Honor of Viktor Hamburger. (Ed: W. M. Cowan) New York: Oxford University Press, and "warm" confirmed from weather records from that summer: weatherspark.com/h/s/146355/1948/1/Historical-Weather-Summer-1948-at-Lambert%E2%80%93St.-Louis-International-Airport-Missouri-United-States#Figures-Temperature
  • St. Louis walk of fame details are from stlouiswalkoffame.org/ and my visit to Rita's star in March 2016 (about a year before her star was formally dedicated, I learned later, so it must have been fairly new at the time).
  • "about a 2-fold excess" of nerve cells is based on Purves (1988) Body and Brain, Harvard University Press, and some of the textbook writers confirmed this in interviews.
  • Confirmation of extra fingers or toes being connected by nerves came from a friend whose son has polydactyly on a foot, and from a hand surgeon I emailed who specializes in congenital birth anomalies, Gene Duene. Gene emailed me, "...all polydactyly appendages are fully innervated (sensory) and vascularized via the neurovascular bundles.... Motor nerves go to the muscle belly.... Sensory nerves directly innervate the skin around the appendage."
  • Interviews with textbook writers were by zoom on 4/9/2021 (Dale Purves), 7/27/21 (Scott Gilbert - used only for background because his text didn't cover this, asked why not more central in a Dev Biol text), 7/28 and 7/29/21 (Lynne Bianchi), 8/3/21 (David Price), 8/26/21 (Dan Sanes), 8/27/21 (Bill Harris).
  • "both made statements about their roles at times, particularly late in their lives, that did not precisely match the published record" An example from each of them:
  • The claim is often repeated that Rita only guessed/proposed that nerve cells deprived of targets degenerated or died in her WWII papers, and that it wasn't nailed down until the 1949 paper (see for example, L. Aloe https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcb.2004.05.011, Dale Purves' 1988 "Body and Brain" book, Hamburger 1992 J Neurobiol 23(9) 1116-1123, and page 653 of From Neuron to Brain 6th edition 2021 by Martin, Brown, Diamond, Cattaneo, and De-Miguel). Cowan 2001 (see note below) was clear about this not being the case when he wrote in his summary of the Hamburger and Levi-Montalcini 1949 paper, "What is particularly significant about this study is not so much its recognition of neuronal degeneration as an important factor in neurogenesis, since this had been previously reported by Levi-Montalcini & Levi (1942, 1944)."
  • Maxwell Cowan's detailed historical article: Cowan M (2001) Annu Rev Neurosci 24:551-600. doi: 10.1146/annurev.neuro.24.1.551. The only fact I could find in Cowan's account through the time of the 1949 paper's publication that did not check out with my own research was Rita's statement, "Writing a scientific paper was a new experience for me". She did write that, but it clearly was not accurate as she had published at least 20 papers by then, including some on which she was the sole author (and the 1944 paper in particular, unlike some of the very short papers, is written to some extent in the style of the VH 1934 paper and the 1949 paper).
  • "fiercely defending her own role in her discoveries" See Neuroscience: One hundred years of Rita quote from Lloyd Greene. I heard similar things in some of the interviews I did. For example, Dale Purves said, "No one has ever been able to take any credit away from Rita because she ensured that she got all that was due her".
  • "when all the values I cherished were being crushed" and the quote that follows are from Rita Levi-Montalcini's article "NGF: An uncharted route", 1992, in The Neurosciences: Paths of Discovery, I, Editors Frederic G. Worden, Judith P. Swazey, George Adelman.
  • Note: I've written here a history of experiments but not of ideas, because I find it much harder to trace with confidence where ideas originated. Although I know that some historians disagree, ideas without experiments seem of little use in my view, i.e. talk is cheap, and it's often possible in scientific fields to find among lots of antecedent guesses some that turned out to be correct but that had little or no role in advancing discovery (for example, Barron DH [J. Comp. Neurol., 81:193-225] speculated about a role for selective neuroblast survival in an Oct 1944 paper, without citing Rita's papers and so perhaps independent of them, and it was only speculation). And I expect that some people sharing even their own personal histories inadvertently re-write histories of where ideas originated. Published experiments leave a more definite trail to trace.
  • I'm happy to document anything else that I neglected to document here. I'll add notes to this page as people ask for more info.
  • The research and writing depended on a lot of cooperation from others who made time to sit for an interview, answer questions, talk a little, or email. Thanks to Piera Levi-Montalcini, Gino and Anna Montalcini, Elisa Salemi, Ruth Angeletti, Pietro De Camilli, Paolo Mazzarello, Marina Bentivoglio, Michael Bressan, Anthony LaMantia, Max Chapman, Amy Chambless, Alessandra Livraghi-Butrico, Dale Purves, David Price, Lynne Bianchi, Scott Gilbert, Dan Sanes, Bill Harris, Nicoletta Fasano, Philip Skroska, Lila Solnica-Krezel, Marco Piccolino, Jean Lauder, Larry Swanson, Ralph Bradshaw, Lloyd and Alcmene Greene, Pietro Calissano, Marty Chalfie, Keith Burridge, Gene Deune, Stuart Feinstein, Tony Hyman, Bratton Holmes, Carol Ann McCormick, Bill Mohler, Beatrice Steinert, Jennifer Walton and the MBL Archives, Sophia Tintori, Kira Heikes, Shane Jinson, Jane Maienschein, Jenny Goldstein, and many friends and colleagues for listening to stories and asking questions, and to Nautilus Editor Kevin Berger for wrestling the draft into shape. Apologies if I forgot anyone here! I'll add more names as I recall other people who helped.
  • Thanks especially to my friends Gaia Pigino and Florian Jug, who responded to my request to find a translator in Italy by agreeing to drop everything in their busy lives and go on the adventure themselves with me.