In this episode of pplpod, we explore the extraordinary life of Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Italian neurobiologist whose greatest discoveries began under some of the most impossible conditions imaginable. During World War II, barred from academic science by fascist racial laws because of her Jewish heritage, she built a secret laboratory inside her bedroom in Turin. With sharpened sewing needles, watchmaker’s tweezers, fertilized chicken eggs, and a microscope, she continued the work the regime tried to stop.

Born in Turin in 1909 to a Sephardic Jewish family, Levi-Montalcini grew up in a home shaped by art, mathematics, engineering, and intellectual discipline. She first dreamed of becoming a writer, but after watching a close family friend die of stomach cancer, she decided she no longer wanted only to observe suffering. She wanted to inter ...