19/07/2026
From living on the streets to being a successful scientist and Nobel Prize laureate.
“...at age 4½, I set off on my own. I headed south, sometimes living in the streets, sometimes joining gangs of other homeless children, sometimes living in orphanages, and most of the time being hungry. My recollections of those four years are vivid but not continuous, rather like a series of snapshots. Some of them are brutal beyond description, others more palatable.”
Mario Capecchi, born in 1937, spent years on the streets in Italy and nearly died of malnutrition in a hospital.
In 2007, he was awarded the medicine prize "for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells."
Read Mario Capecchi’s story “The Making of a Scientist”: https://bit.ly/2JW6ek1
