Apparently it’s not just the milkman that can wake you up in the early morning. The Nobel committee decided to call up Mario Capecchi’s home at 3am to tell him he had just won the price in Physiology or Medicine, making him the first recipient from the University of Utah.

Capecchi, along with co-winners Evans and Smithies, developed in 1989 a technique known as ‘gene targeting’, which enables researchers to create animal models (e.g. mice, flies, etc.) with very precise genetic mutations in order to study the effects of those in living creatures. Oh, yes, if you happen to be one of those anti-evolution creationist, you should not listen to all of this. The technique is now used widely to understand normal as well as pathological biology.

The life of Capecchi certainly makes him worthy of the title of Jewcy Radical. He was born in Verona in the late ‘30s, and his mother, a poet, was arrested by the Gestapo as a political prisoner and transfered to Dachau when Capecchi was four years old. After the loss of his father, he lived on the streets with a band of orphans, until he fell ill and was hospitalized in 1945. His mother had survived Dachau and as soon as the American army freed the camp, she returned to Italy to look for her son. She found him in the hospital at Reggio Emilia, and immediately took him with her to the States, where, after debarking at Ellis Island, they met with her brother.

After re-adapting himself to a normal life, Capecchi followed a more ‘classical’ route to the Nobel, eventually studying under Jim Watson of DNA fame (his borrowed partly from another Jewcy Radical, Rosalind Franklin).

I foresee a cinematographic adaptation halfway between A Beautiful Mind and The Pianist coming up. In the meantime, here’s a man whose success we can all rejoice in.