Oldest Nobel laureate turns 100
 Rita Levi-Montalcini received France's Legion d'Honneur medal in 2008 |
The Italian scientist and oldest living Nobel laureate, Rita Levi-Montalcini, is celebrating her 100th birthday.
Despite her age, she still works every day at the European Brain Research Institute which she founded in Rome.
She is described as the grand old lady of the Italian Senate, where she became a senator for life in 2001.
The scientist, whose family were Jewish, told the BBC that Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime was partly to thank for her career.
Born in Turin in 1909, Professor Levi-Montalcini was forced by the anti-Jewish laws of the late 1930s to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home.
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