CUEM

The Bologna Project

ESGM students and faculty

His life

Levi was born in Trieste in 1872 to a family of Jewish Bankers. He began his university studies in 1889 at the University of Florence, but soon he moved to Vienna to study under Italian microbiologist Alexander Lustig. Here, he completed his studies in 1895 with a thesis on sodium chloride induced lesions. He then returned to Florence to work in the Psychiatric Hospital of San Salvi under Eugenio Tanzi and Ernesto Lugaro studying nerve tissue, a subject to which he would devote the larger part of his career. While at San Salvi he published considerable findings on the histophysiology of nerve tissue, although the significance of these results would only be understood decades later.After a year in Berlin studying with embryologist Oskar Hertwig, Levi again returned to Florence and began working with Giulio Chiarugi at the Institute of Human Anatomy, studying neuroencephalic histology and the correspondence between animal cell growth and corporeal growth. Not only did Levi later edit Chiarugi’s manual of human anatomy Istituzioni di anatomia dell’uomo, but much later he would also publish his own treatise on histology, Trattato di Istologia in 1927. Both these texts would be used by generations of Italian physicians and medical students.

After a brief term of service as a military physician in World War I, Levi was called to the University in Sassari (Sardinia) in 1910, and then to the University of Palermo (Sicily) in 1915. It was in Palermo that he further developed the technique, created by Ross Harrison and perfected by Alexis Carrel, of cultivating tissue in vitro in order to study the structure and behavior of living cells exposed to manipulated environmental factors. Levi used a ‘cinematic method’ of repeated photographic exposures to observe histological and cytological development, and became one of the first to study the mitochondrion.

Following the war, Levi was offered tenure at the University of Turin, continue studying the nervous system even after she left Levi’s Institute for and in 1919 he became director of the University’s Institute for Normal Anatomy. Here he trained many important scientists, most notably the nobel laureates Rita Levi-Montalcini, Renato Dulbecco, and Salvador Luria. Of these, Rita Levi-Montalcini was the only one to the Washington University in St. Louis (USA), where she would eventually discover the Nerve Growth factor (NGF). Renato Dulbecco went on to study viruses and cancer genetics at the California Institute of Technology (USA), making important contributions also to the Human Genome Project, while Salvador Luria pursued biophysics and genetics research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I came to recognize another side of Levi when he accepted me as an intern in his lab. In the lab there were some other students, among them Rita Levi Montalcini and Salvador Luria. Rita was in my year, whereas Luria was a year ahead. Levi did not participate directly in our work, but followed it closely. Often we discussed it together; and when one of us had some result that seemed interesting, we used to show to him. On that occasion Levi went into all the details of the work, examining all the results, and at the end he decided whether the result was good or not. I remember when he rejected some of my results. At first I was horrified, but once I thought it over, I came to recognize that Levi was right, and that his negative comments were in fact very useful for allowing me to make progress in my work. When Levi found that a result was interesting, he got very excited, and used to encourage us to continue in the direction he found interesting. In both cases Levi's feedback, whether criticism or encouragment, had an extraordinary effect on all of us, and contributed to our formation as scientists.



“I think that Levi’s attitude explains why the three of us ended up, many years later, earning the Nobel Prize in different fields. He had taught us the right attitude for doing research.” -Renato Dulbecco -



1896- While in Vienna working under Lustig, Levi studied the characteristic differences in the amount and distribution of basophilic and acidophilic constituents of neuronal nuclei of different sizes.

1897- At the Psychiatric Hospital of San Salvi, Levi continued his studies of neurohistology. He investigated the variations of perikaryon volume of large neurons in animals of different body size, discovering the factors that determine the size of sensory and motor neurons.

1898- Still at San Salvi, Levi showed that the Nissl stain is not strictly specific to the neuron. He also showed the quantitative changes of Nissl’s substance in the perikaryon of the large motor and sensory neurons in cold-blooded animals during natural and experimentally-induced hibernation, and after return to active life.

1904- After a brief sojourn in Berlin, Levi returned to the Institute of Human Anatomy in Florence, where he carried out comparative anatomical investigations of the ventral and dorsal hippocampus. He was the first to undertake a histogenetic study of this region, describing the hippocampal layers and the neighboring telencephalic wall.

1902-1908-At San Salvi, he also studied cerebrospinal ganglia in over 50 species of vertebrates, discovering the existence of “fenestrated” apparatuses and of small appendages of the ganglionic neurons of large animals. He also studied the relationship between cell growth and corporeal growth in animals of various sizes.

1910- In Sassari, he began research on the chondriome (the mitochondrial system) and definitively showed that these structures play no role in the formation of the cytoplasmic structures that appear during cell differentiation or as a consequence of cell function. He also made many important observations about the mitochondrion.

1915- In Palermo, Levi pioneered the use of in vitro tissue cultures in histological research.

1919- In Turin, he continued his in vitro studies, analyzing the structure of neurons, the growth of the neurite, and the flow of materials along the neurite. Using microcinematography, he was able to study the transitory and permanent connections established between branches of independent axons, the reactions of the perikaryon and the cell processes to discreet injuries produced with the needle of a micromanipulator, the generation of new neuritis and the regeneration of the proximal stump of severed ones.

1921-1925- At his Institute in Turin, Levi studied the developmental mechanisms that control size and number of histomeres during animal growth.

1927-1937- Levi directed a research program in his laboratory aimed at discovering the morphological aspects of senescence of tissues and organs, delineating its course, and elucidating the differences between physiological and pathological senescence.