"From Child on Street to Nobel Laureate"

Read the full article by Christopher Lee in The Washington Post, October 9, 2007.

Mario R. Capecchi, who just won the Nobel Prize, was only 3 when his mother was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany as a political prisoner. She had "sold her possessions, giving the money to a peasant family that she asked to care for her son. But the money ran out in a year."

"They didn't have the resources to keep me and maintain their own family," the scientist said in a telephone interview yesterday. "So I went on the streets."

Capecchi moved from town to town, hungry most of the time and occasionally living in orphanages or traveling with gangs of other homeless children who stole food from carts while other members of the group distracted the vendors. "Just surviving from day to day pretty much occupies your mind," he said in a 1997 interview with the Salt Lake Tribune.

He spent years on the streets and nearly died of malnutrition in a hospital near Bologna, where he lay naked and feverish on a bed, existing on a daily bowl of chicory coffee and a small crust of bread. His mother, who was liberated from Dachau by U.S. troops in 1945, found him at the hospital after searching for more than a year.

Comment: This is an amazing story, and one that adds luster to the character of a man who has achieved more than all but a very few people in spite of his horrible childhood. The story suggests how much we may be giving up as a society by not rescuing the millions of kids living in poverty not dissimilar to that Capecchi barely survived. JAD