Mario Capecchi - from Begging, Stealing to Nobel Prize
R Shankar/Newindpress
Bangalore, Oct 10: While the world is applauding the Nobel Prize for medicine conferred on Mario Capecchi for his work on gene targeting, not many know that as a child he had to beg, occasionally steal to keep hunger at bay and had to lie naked on a hospital bed so that he would not flee.
When he went to the US as a lad, he could not speak one word in English. But when he overcame all these hurdles to do research, he applied for funds for testing the feasibility of gene targeting in mammalian cells.
“Not worthy of pursuit” was the response of reviewers in 1980. He did not give up and resubmitted his proposal four years later. The reviewers not only enthusiastically approved his grant, but extended an apology: “We are glad that you didn’t follow our advice.”
The gene to do the impossible was probably inherited by Capecchi. His grandmother Lucy Dodd-Ramberg sailed all the way from America to Europe to become a painter.
Lucy, Capecchi’s mother, had a passion for language and spoke about 15. In one interview, Capecchi recalled that “even if she didn’t know one, in a half hour, she could pick it up”.
When World War II broke out, his mother was arrested by the Gestapo. But in anticipation of the arrest, she had sold all her possessions and given the money to friends to help raise her son on their farm. He used to help the family make bread and wine. But when the money ran out, Capecchi was on the streets. He was just four and a half years old.
He had to beg, joined gangs of other homeless children, sometimes lived in orphanages and most of the time found himself hungry and desperate.
He had to occasionally steal bread to keep himself alive. Capecchi was hospitalised for malnutrition and was given just one cup of coffee and a small crust of bread every day. He was desperate to escape.
He describes the picture thus: “Scores of beds lined the rooms and corridors of the hospital, one bed touching the next. No sheets, no blankets. We lay naked on those stripped beds. The nurse promised me that, if I could go through one day without a high fever, I could leave the hospital. She knew that, without any clothes, I was not likely to run away. By late morning, the high burning fever would return, and we would pass into oblivion.”
Meanwhile, Lucy was released after the war and had to search for her son for over a year. And she found him when he turned nine. Within weeks, the two set sail for America to join his uncle and aunt. Capecchi was fortunate to join the Quakers school that did not have any textbooks but only dialogues with the teachers.
There was no looking back from there. Apart from sport and pencils, the Nobel laureate loves space. He lives on a 17-acre plot and when he is cut off by snow, Capecchi loves it the best.