In the early 1940s, as bombs fell on Turin and Mussolini’s race laws barred Jewish citizens from academic life, a young woman built a secret laboratory in her bedroom. Her surgical instruments were repurposed sewing needles, her incubator was handmade, and her subjects were chicken embryos. There, hiding from a fascist regime that had legally erased her career, Rita Levi-Montalcini made observations about how the nervous system wires itself that would eventually earn her the Nobel Prize and reshape modern medicine.

This episode follows her from an aspiring novelist to a medical student defying her own father’s expectations, through the Holocaust years living underground in Florence, to the landmark 1952 experiment in Rio de Janeiro that revealed nerve growth factor. It also examines the harder chapters: a pharmaceutical scandal that tested her legacy, a late-career pivot into pain research in her eighties, and a Senate seat she held into her nineties. She died in 2012 at 103, the longest-lived Nobel laureate in history.

• How wartime scarcity shaped her science: why cheap, fast-developing chicken eggs let her discover that the nervous system overproduces neurons and prunes away the ones that fail to connect
• The elegant deduction behind nerve growth factor, where nerves following veins but ignoring arteries proved a tumor was broadcasting a chemical signal through the bloodstream
• The Cronassial controversy: a drug she endorsed, a rare paralysis syndrome caused by molecular mimicry, and the bribery scandal that kept it on the Italian market a decade too long
• Her final acts: identifying PEA’s calming effect on mast cells in her eighties, casting deciding votes as Senator for life at 97, and founding programs to fund young women in science