Memory of a Nobel-winner's childhood - November 07, 2007
There's an odd and rather sad story making the rounds from the Associated Press. It's about Mario Capecchi, who shared this year's Nobel prize in medicine for his work on knock-out mice.
By any measure, Capecchi had a tough childhood. In multiple interviews he has described how the Gestapo came to his home in Italy and sent his mother off to the Dachau concentration camp when he was three -- leaving him scramble the streets on his own for several years. Reporters from the Associated Press, though, have uncovered inconsistencies in his story - notably the lack of any evidence that his mother actually was at Dachau, plus records that suggest he was taken in by his father when his mother vanished.
According to the AP, Capecchi - now at the University of Utah - has not become defensive about the inconsistencies in his story, but took 'an almost scholarly interest' in their findings. An Italian historian has suggested that young children often were not told the full story of their early years, in order to avoid any further trauma.
The hardscrabble details of Capecchi's early life are, of course, irrelevant when it comes to the breakthrough work he did later in developing ways to disable specific genes in mouse strains. The Salt Lake Tribune reports how the university president and co-workers are standing by him. "It's totally irrelevant to Mario as a person and as a scientist," said a colleague.
The Chicago Sun-Times puts a rather unfair headline, in my view, on the story: 'Is a Nobel winner's mind playing tricks on him?'
Perhaps now other researchers can spend more time looking into the little-understood phenomenon of childhood memories and trauma.
