Nobel Medical Prize Shared by American, Italian-American
An American biochemist and an Italian-American biologist won the 1986 Nobel Prize in medicine today for discoveries on cell growth. Their pioneering research launched a new branch of science leading to a better understanding of many diseases.
The Nobel Assembly of Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute awarded the prize to Stanley Cohen, 63, a researcher at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn., and Rita Levi-Montalcini, 77, of the Institute of Cell Biology C.N.R. in Rome.
Cohen and Levi-Montalcini, known in Italy as “Signora of the cells,” worked together in the 1950s at Washington University in St. Louis, where they discovered bodies called “growth factors.”
Diseases Better Understood
As “a direct consequence” of their discoveries, medical science has increased its understanding of many diseases, including tumors, developmental malformations, generative changes in senile dementia and delayed wound healing, the Nobel committee said in a statement.
It said the study of growth factors is expected to yield in the near future new drugs and improved treatment of various diseases.
“The idea is it gives an inkling as to what controls cell growth, any place and any process that helps control cell growth,” Cohen said in a telephone interview from his Nashville home.
He added, however, that “there is much, much, much we don’t understand.”
‘I’m a Little Numb’
Asked about winning the prize, Cohen said: “I’m a little bit numb, trying to adjust to the new position in life. I’m 63 years old and I’ve been in this business forever. I wasn’t working for the Nobel Prize.”
Cohen was educated at Brooklyn College, Oberlin College and the University of Michigan and has been a research professor of the American Cancer Society.
Levi-Montalcini told a reporter outside her Rome home, “I’m so very happy; I wasn’t expecting it.”
She was born in the northern city of Turin and obtained a degree in medicine and surgery from Turin University in 1936.
She moved to the United States in 1951, working as a professor at Washington University. She returned to Italy in 1977, directing the cellular biology laboratory at the National Council of Scientific Research in Rome.
25 ‘Happy Years’ in U.S.
“Oh, how beautiful my American experience was,” she told a newspaper interviewer a few years ago. “Twenty-five happy years, the happiest and most productive of my life.” She holds Italian and American citizenships.
Cohen and Levi-Montalcini will share a cash stipend of about $290,000.
Before this year’s award, 59 Americans had won the medicine prize alone or jointly since it was first awarded in 1901.
The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine is the first to be announced in this year’s series of awards established in the will of Alfred B. Nobel, the Swede who invented dynamite.
