Word: capecchi
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...Nurturing Nobel Winners The essay on geneticist Mario Capecchi eloquently described his remarkable life [Oct. 22]. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded his innovative research for nearly 40 years. As the Essay noted, when Capecchi submitted a grant application for studies that included the work leading to the Nobel Prize, the scientists evaluating the proposal expressed skepticism. Nevertheless, the evaluators gave the application an outstanding overall score, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences awarded the grant in 1981. The flexibility of the NIH grant system made it possible for Capecchi to use the funds, in part...
...essay on geneticist Mario Capecchi eloquently described his remarkable life [Oct. 22]. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded his innovative research for nearly 40 years. As the Essay noted, when Capecchi submitted a grant application for studies that included the work leading to the Nobel Prize, the group of scientists evaluating the proposal expressed skepticism about the experiments. Nevertheless, the evaluators gave the application an outstanding overall score, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences awarded the grant in 1981. The flexibility of the NIH grant system made it possible for Capecchi to use the funds...
Creativity, Capecchi once said, comes from "the abrasive juxtaposition" of life experiences. His old life and new one certainly rubbed each other raw. Some teachers wrote off the feral boy who had never set foot in a school and spoke no English; but others gave him paints and told him to make murals to communicate. One day he was beating up the other third-graders, since that was what he knew how to do. And soon he was beating up older kids on behalf of his peers. "That gave me a position," he says, "some social standing...
...Capecchi ultimately found his way to Harvard, the center of the universe in the early days of molecular biology. But he felt crowded by colleagues whose rivalries consumed them as much as their research. So he set off for the University of Utah, where the sight lines suited him better and collegiality was the key to success. He lives in a house high over a canyon. "I love looking across long distances," he says. "I think it sort of opens up my mind...
This vista is necessary for his work as well as his soul. Capecchi looks at science as a series of circles: the smallest circle is the one in which everyone is doing the same thing. As you move farther out, "fewer people are willing to go there, but you're charting new areas. Go too far, step out of bounds, and you're in science fiction. So you have to be careful. But you want to be as close to the edge as possible." When he first proposed manipulating mouse genes to help model disease, the nih gatekeepers thought...