A Century and Still Going…

ABC News’ Stu Schutzman reports:

"Most of all, don’t fear difficult moments," says Rita Levi Montalcini, "The best things come from them."

Take that from one who has been there.  Ms. Levi Montalcini has recently been speaking volumes about those "difficult moments" during a lifetime which, this Wednesday will reach 100 years. 

100 is unimaginable to most of us considering retirement in our 50s and 60s. At 100, Rita Levi Montalcini is not retired nor is there anything retiring about her. She still, to this day does not miss a day of work, very important work.

Dr. Levi Montalcini shared 1986′s Nobel Prize for medicine. She and her colleague won for their landmark research on the growth of cells. She was born in Turin, Italy to Jewish parents. She made it to college and medical school over the objections of her mathematician father who didn’t believe in higher education for women. But afterwards she couldn’t find work due to the rampant anti-semitism of Mussolini’s regime.

"I should thank Mussolini for having declared me of an inferior race," she says with a tinge of sarcasm. "This led me to the joy of working no longer, unfortunately, in university institutes, but in a bedroom."

Levi Montalcini was hired by the allies as a doctor for Italian refugees after Italy’s liberation in 1944. After the war, she came to America planning on spending one semester at Washington University in St. Louis — she did research there for the next 30 years.

She never married or had children; having it all simply "wasn’t done" in her time. Today she lives and continues to work in Rome; be it research or the charities she’s involved with. She has hardly slowed down.

"Arriving at 100 is a prize for me," she says. "At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20." 

How many of us will ever be able to say that.