As a woman growing up in early 20th-century Italy, Rita Levi-Montalcini, against the objections of her father, attended the Turin School of Medicine, graduating with honors as an M.D. In Europe on the brink of World War II, Levi-Montalcini continued studying how the body's nervous system develops and discovered the nerve growth factor, a protein that controls the growth of neurons and is required for their survival. Building upon her findings, she and a host of other researchers unearthed a whole class of compounds that are intimately involved in every stage of a cell's or an organism's life, from conception to death. Today, scientists are still exploring the implications of the work that earned her a Nobel Prize in 1986.