Monday, October 08, 2007

Nobel Prizes

Men whose names I can't pronounce have won Nobel Prizes for manipulating mouse genes in ways I cannot fathom. Why would I blog about that?

Sucker for sentimentality. Here's what Yahoo says about one of the winners, Mario Capecchi:
The Nobel is a particularly striking achievement for Capecchi, (pronounced kuh-PEK'-ee). A native of Italy, he was separated from his mother at age 4 when she was taken to the Dachau concentration camp as a political prisoner during World War II.
For four years, Capecchi lived on the street or in orphanages, "and most of the time hungry," he recalled in a University of Utah publication in 1997. Malnutrition sent him to a hospital where his mother found him on his ninth birthday. Within two weeks they left for the United States, where he went to school for the first time, starting in third grade despite not knowing English.

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