

Nobel scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini dies, aged 103 - wslh
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/jewish-italian-nobel-scientist-levi-montalcini-dies-aged-103-1.490888

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beefman
Her longevity may not be an accident:
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-this-the-
secret...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-this-the-secret-of-
eternal-life-1674005.html)

"Every day, she takes NGF in the form of eye drops"

~~~
joe_the_user
Unfortunately, NGF seems to be more or less unavailable to the public.

~~~
beefman
I found the same thing, but lion's mane mushroom did come up

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18758067>

I took an extract for a while and thought it might be doing something, but I
didn't collect any data so it's hard to draw conclusions.

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reasonattlm
It should be noted that, on balance, everything except physical health becomes
better with age. Outside of degenerative aging, becoming older is so good that
people are driven to apologism for the fact that aging cripples and kills them
- they conflate being old and being aged, seeing two very different things as
one, and a certain confusion arises after that point.

Consider how much better it will be to be older once we start being able to
treat the root causes of the degenerative medical condition called aging. If
you're not there yet, consider just how good being older must be in order for
people to be able to say they are well off even while their health is
crumbling.

[http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/uoc--
poa12031...](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/uoc--
poa120312.php)

~~~
elemeno
And, potentially, mental health - though the variance between people is huge.
While my grandfather (mother's side) was mentally as sharp as he'd ever been
when he died at 92 and my 94 year old grandmother (father's side) still plays
bridge several times a week and has a fantastic memory for everything related
to the family, it's also all too easy to find people who have been afflicted
with dementia and alzheimer's from their 70s and 80s.

~~~
reasonattlm
Mental health in that sense is physical health - age-related mental decline is
caused failure in the physical processes of the brain. E.g. loss of blood
vessel integrity, buildup of aggregates, diminished stem cell activity in
response to rising cellular damage, etc.

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japhyr
Fred Beckey [1] has long been one of my heroes for how to age gracefully - he
will turn 90 next month, and still climbs hard.

This article just gave me a new model for aging well. I turned 40 this month,
and I feel more alive intellectually than I ever have. It is inspiring to
think that I could continue to build on what I already know for another 60
years.

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Beckey>

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return0
Everyone seems to focus on the fact that she was 103. That's not her greatest
achievement. As a jewish woman she faced many obstacles in her career, was
forced to work at home, immigrated to the US and finally discovered NGF, for
which she won the Nobel prize. She was also a senator for life and a star
scientist in Italy.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini>

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Claudus
As I've aged, I've come to the conclusion that people become "old" more by
choice than by the passage of time.

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locci
She was involved in a scandal involving a drug called Cronassial, a
pharmaceutical industry called Fidia and the Nobel committee. Through various
donations, Fidia (at the time a small pharmaceutical company) used the
scientist from 1975 onwards to market a new panacea drug called Cronassial
(which was banned in the Nineties across Europe as it was linked to Guillain-
Barré syndrome and possibly because of the human spongiform encephalopathy
scare). The drug was approved thanks to the corrupt hand of Duilio Poggiolini
(with the ministry of health) who was finally arrested in 1993. Fidia's
"collaboration" with the scientist culminated in 1986 with the Nobel prize,
for which Fidia seems to have corrupted at least one of the committee members
with 8 million dollars [1], fact that came out during the Italian corruption
trials in the first part of the Nineties.

It seems that Fidia's revenue jumped a 1000 folds thanks to Cronassial,
apparently from 600 million Lire to 420 billion, with the drug representing
82% of the revenue, but I wasn't able to find a source for that.

It's quite unfortunate Levi-Montalcini never came clean of this scandal,
refusing to comment on anything related to Cronassial and claiming ignorance
of the facts.

Disappointing as all this might be, NGF is a great discovery which is well
worth a Nobel prize and she seems to have been a very good scientist too.

1) Nilsson M. Nobel committee refutes allegations of corruption. Lancet 1995;
346: 763-4.

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jodosha
This is a sad day. Everyone seems to be touched here in Italy.

