Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

As Luck Would Have It

How else define such an incredible success story, but sheer, blind luck? Here was a child, barely out of infancy, at a time of grave vulnerability, a time of social and political upheaval, a time marked by the personal horror of a mother imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, hoping to save her child's life by giving him over to the care of a peasant family in Italy, only to have him released to the wartime streets, surviving on his own from the age of four to nine.

Yet, this child did survive. His mother, a political prisoner, taken to Dachau. The peasant family, once the funds to tend to the child evaporated, left him on the streets. At times in the company of other homeless children. Occasionally taken to orphanages. But always desolate, destitute, and ravenously hungry. Placed in a hospital for malnutrition care. Then, miraculously, his desperate mother who survived Dachau somehow tracked him down after a year's frantic search.

Taking him to the United States once the war ended, where her brother lived, and practised his profession as a physicist, inspiring his young nephew to surmount all the difficulties inherent in a learning environment without the language, with the traumatic memory of his early years struggling to maintain himself, a child exposed to the bitter elements of homelessness, no one to care for him, starvation on the near horizon.

Yet here is that same child within the man now 70, who along with two other researchers has been named as the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Science. Mario Capecchi, that amazing survivor who went on to make a life for himself as a scientist of world renown despite the horrendous obstacles placed in the path of an abandoned child on the war torn streets of Italy. He, along with Oliver Smithies and Martin Evans, were honoured for their groundbreaking scientific work.

Work which the Nobel committee explained "has revolutionized life science and plays a key role in the development of medical therapy". And as further detailed by the head of the Mammalian Genetics Unit of the Medical Research Council: "Most of our profound understanding of how genes cause disease in humans has come by identifying particular genes in (a specific laboratory) mouse and how it develops. Without this toolkit, we would be considerably hampered."

The human spirit is compelling, amazing in its tenacity, its hold on life, its vision of the future, its hope and determination toward survival.

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