On April 22, the world’s oldest living Nobel laureate turned 100.

Italian biologist Rita Levi-Montalcini won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1986 for her discovery of nerve growth factor, a protein that triggers many types of nerves to grow.

Levi-Montalcini’s background is remarkable. As a Jew in fascist Italy in 1936, she was forced to leave her university. She took her experiments home with her – literally – and continued to study how animals develop at a makeshift laboratory in her house. From her autobiography:

In 1936 Mussolini issued the “Manifesto per la Difesa della Razza”, signed by ten Italian ’scientists’. The manifesto was soon followed by the promulgation of laws barring academic and professional careers to non-Aryan Italian citizens. After a short period spent in Brussels as a guest of a neurological institute, I returned to Turin on the verge of the invasion of Belgium by the German army, Spring 1940, to join my family. The two alternatives left then to us were either to emigrate to the United States, or to pursue some activity that needed neither support nor connection with the outside Aryan world where we lived. My family chose this second alternative. I then decided to build a small research unit at home and installed it in my bedroom.

After the end of World War II, she came to the United States to work with Viktor Hamburger at Washington University in St. Louis, where she made her seminal discovery.  She worked in St. Louis until 1977, when she retired to Italy.

In her case, retirement means working in the lab, helping her foundation support science fellowships for women in Africa and serving as a senator for life in the Italian government and as a goodwill ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

According to the Associated Press, she dispensed the following advice at her 100th birthday party:

“Above all, don’t fear difficult moments. The best comes from them.”