“In Praise of Imperfection” is the memoir of Rita Levi-Montalcini who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering Nerve Growth Factor in cancer cells. She was the fourth woman to ever receive a Nobel prize. The book details the research, including a 1952 visit to a longtime friend’s cell culture laboratory in Rio de Janeiro. Together, they discovered critical chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and worked out its biochemistry. Dr. Levi-Montalcini recalls her work in Rio as “one of the most intense periods of my life in which moments of enthusiasm and despair alternated with the regularity of a biological cycle.”

Although she was highly focused and single-minded in her research, she also saw life and research as a series of cycles, not linear events. “It is imperfection — not perfection — that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain, and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological, and intellectual development.”

Although she worked in the U.S. at Washington University in St. Louis for 30 years (from 1947-1977), she returned to Italy in the to continue her research there. She became more outgoing over the years and loved to host dinner parties, even though she was not herself interested in food. Always beautifully coiffed, and designing her own clothes in later years, she lived exuberantly until 103. Here are some quotes and a two-minute video from Nobel.org.

The final chapter in her memoir deals with the death of her brother at the hands of the Nazis.
She laments how people are driven by greed and the desire for power and territory. She observes that the body’s limbic system has remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years while the neocortex has enjoyed explosive growth. Unfortunately, we are mostly blind to the drives from the deepest part of our nervous system. As a biologist, this uneven development of human brainpower has caused much suffering and loss. The limbic system manages functions like breathing as well as instinctive behaviors like survival and mating. I realized that maybe the reason the yogis tell us to “return to the breath” is a way to connect consciously with this important but often forgotten layer of the nervous system.