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All three winners of this year"s Nobel Prize for Medicine are eminent scientists, but Mario Capecchi is the one with the spiral-staircase stow: 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 1 . What I found actually was just opportunity." But his story also has enough nice serrated edges to 2 our theories about genes and genius and what really makes us who we are.
You could say the visionary geneticist had a 3 genetic edge. Capecchi"s grandmother was a painter, his uncle a renowned physicist, and his mother Lucy Ramberg an expat American poet 4 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 5 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 6 on the streets. He was 4 years old.
All children have their own normal; they have not yet seen any worlds other than their own. Capecchi"s 7 was an uncontrolled experiment in resilience. "I never felt sorry for myself," he recalls. "Children are remarkably 8 . Put them in a situation, and they simply will do whatever it is they need to do."
For his band of urchins, that meant a cunning methodical pursuit of food and shelter. They worked together like raptors, one child 9 the street vendors so another could steal the fruit. Capecchi finally landed in a 10 in Reggio Emilia, where he could starve more systematically. The daily 11 was a piece of bread and some chicory coffee, and to keep the children from running off, "they 12 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 13 plotting as he imagined all the ways he might escape and the obstacles he"d 14 to do so.
In 1945, when American soldiers liberated Dachau, Lucy went hunting for her son. She scoured hospital records, searching for more than a year before she 15 him down. It was on his 9th birthday, Oct. 6, 1946, that the mother he scarcely 16 arrived, a new Tyrolean outfit in hand, including the hat with the feather. She took him to Rome, where he had his first 17 in six years, and ultimately to the New World, where they settled in Quaker Commune outside Philadelphia.
Creativity, Capecchi once said, comes from "the 18 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 19 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 20 third-graders, since that was what he knew how to do. And soon he was beating up older kids on 21 of his peers. "That gave me a position," he says, "some social standing."
Capecchi ultimately 22 his way to Harvard, the center of the universe in the early days of molecular biology. But he felt 23 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 24 to success. He lives in a house high over a canyon. "I love looking across long distance," he says. "I think it sort of 25 up my mind."
This vista is necessary for his work as well as his 26 . Capecchi looks at science as a series of circles: the smallest circle is the one in which everyone is doing the 27 thing. As you move farther out "fewer people are willing to go there, but you"re charting new area. 28 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 29 as possible." When he first proposed manipulating mouse genes to help model disease, the NIH gatekeepers thought he was over the line, "Not 30 of pursuit," they said of his grant proposals. Happily Capecchi ignored them. Now he triumphed in spite of his ordeals.