Finally, a chance to break out the Spies Like Us quotes.
I found out yesterday that the grand total of Nobel Prize Laureates I've met is up to one:
U.S. citizens Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies and Sir Martin J. Evans of Britain won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a technique for manipulating mouse genes.
The widely used process has helped scientists use mice to study heart disease, diabetes, cancer, cystic fibrosis and other diseases.
Capecchi, 70, who was born in Italy, is at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Smithies, 82, born in Britain, is at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Evans, 66, works at Cardiff University in Wales.
They were honored for a technique called gene targeting, which lets scientists inactivate or modify particular genes in mice. That in turn lets them study how those genes affect health and disease.
My father did his postdoc work with Mario Capecchi at the U of U back in the 70s. I was just a snot-nosed kid with little knowledge of what they were up to beyond the fact that I wasn't allowed to touch anything in the lab, especially anything with that orange trefoil design on it.
Being that young and stupid, I also had no idea what the guy had gone through:
Long before Mario Capecchi helped find a way to silence genes in mice and help spur drug discovery, he wandered the Italian countryside as a hungry child.
Capecchi, born in Italy and now at the University of Utah, joined two other researchers yesterday in winning the Nobel Prize for medicine. As a youth, he endured four years of homelessness during World War II that ended on his ninth birthday, when his mother, released from a Nazi concentration camp, found him starving in a hospital.
[...]
Capecchi's mother gave a neighboring family in the Italian Alps money to care for him while she wrote anti-Nazi poetry during the war. When that money ran out and his mother was imprisoned, he wandered the countryside, malnourished and ill, eventually coming to rest in a hospital in Reggio Emilia.``The way they kept us there was they wouldn't give us any clothes,'' he recalled. ``I had a lot of time to concentrate on ways to escape and I tried many things.''
Hours of plotting escape from the hospital, along with the self-sufficiency that came from surviving street life, gave Capecchi the courage to go ahead with gene targeting, he said. He used funds that had been granted for other projects to support his work with mice.
I'd think that those early experiences would give you the courage to go ahead and do just about anything. Regardless, I hereby apologize for breaking those test tubes. Congratulations, Doctor.
I saw a brief news thing about Capecchi a couple nights ago, and he described his childhood. He and his mother sailed for the States almost immediately after being reunited. He said, “I envisioned America being paved with streets of gold, but all I found was opportunity.” I teach knuckleheaded 9th-graders, so I’m sort of a sucker for inspirational crap, but I found that to be very moving. I told my kids about it the next day. And then I told them to stop bitching.
Yeah, it was pretty cool news—too bad none of his brilliance rubbed off on your old man. About all I ever did was to entertain him in various ways. Remember your old Grover hand puppet? I’d have Grover peeking in on him around the door, walking past his lab window, doing double takes and other amusing muppet stuff. Great way to cut the strain from 10 hours looking in a microspope. It was actually quite an achievement to make him laugh.
By the way, your old home town newspaper, the Bryan/College Station Eagle had a “great” take on the story. I’ve read a lot of clips about the event, but the Eagle was the only news organization I saw that felt it was necessary to tell us “His mother, a poet, and his father, an Italian military officer, were not married” Good call, Ags—three put downs in one sentence.
n00b - I’ve met at least two, and actually taken a class from one.