Word: capecchi
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...three winners of this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine are eminent scientists, but Mario Capecchi is the one with the spiral-staircase story: the starving, homeless Italian street kid who found his way to America, to Harvard, to Utah, ever the refugee, before finally arriving at eternal glory and the Nobel Prize. It's in many ways a familiar tale, Oliver Twist meets Albert Einstein, the pilgrim who comes to the promised land expecting, as he says, "the roads to be paved in gold. What I found actually was just opportunity." But his story also has enough nice serrated...
...could say the visionary geneticist had a clear genetic edge. Capecchi's grandmother was a painter, his uncle a renowned physicist, and his mother Lucy Ramberg an expat American poet living in a chalet in the Italian Alps when Mario was born in 1937. She had fallen in with a group of bohemian writers who believed, her son says with just a trace of bemusement, that "they could wipe out Fascism and Nazism with a pen." After the Gestapo came in 1941 to take her to Dachau, Mario landed on the streets. He was 4 years...
...children have their own normal; they have not yet seen any worlds other than their own. Capecchi's world was an uncontrolled experiment in resilience. "I never felt sorry for myself," he recalls. "Children are remarkably adaptable. Put them in a situation, and they simply will do whatever it is they need...
...band of urchins, that meant a cunning, methodical pursuit of food and shelter. They worked together like raptors, one child distracting the street vendor so another could steal the fruit. Capecchi finally landed in a hospital in Reggio Emilia, where he could starve more systematically. The daily ration was a piece of bread and some chicory coffee, and to keep the children from running off, "they took all of our clothes away." He lay on a bed with no sheets, no blankets, feverish with hunger. It was there he learned the art of patient plotting as he imagined...
...other recipients of the Kyoto Prize this year are Dr. Mario Renato Capecchi in the field of life sciences and Dr. Donald Ervin Knuth in the field of information sciences...