Knock me baby...one more time!!!

I happened to read a couple of articles about Mario Capecchi, this year's winner of the Nobel prize for Medicine/Physiology. Beyond all the insanely juvenile discussion on USMLE forums( of all places really!!) about whether it should be 'Al Gore and the UN organization headed by the guy with the funny name' who won the Nobel prize for peace, or 'Rajendra Pachauri led IGPC and Al Gore, you myopic Americans' , and each group calling the other racist( God I have started to hate how every TD&H is twisting this word to personal gain ), this is really a story that inspires. It is like a whiff of hard earned fresh air amidst the stench of the mediocre.

Mario Capecchi struggled in his childhood as a kid bound to hospital fed coffee and bread, stripped of clothes -so that they could not run away, in German held Italy. Hunger was another thing that kept them from running away.They were kids, mouldable to the situation. No one attempted a great escape.His mother found him after the American soldiers liberated them from the Nazis. Capecchi had his first bath after 6 years!!

As many of the wise scientists did then, he left for America.He came to the banks of the Charles river.But he found Harvard crowded by the rivalry of people who I mentioned earlier, place such a premium on their name. So he set off for the University of Utah.This is where he did most of his research work.

Capecchi looks at science as a series of circles: the smallest circle is the one in which everyone is doing the same thing. As you move farther out, "fewer people are willing to go there, but you're charting new areas. Go too far, step out of bounds, and you're in science fiction. So you have to be careful. But you want to be as close to the edge as possible."

Thats really a fabulous concept of innovative thought.Hindsight gives you that wisdom I guess.But when he proposed his theory of gene modification to the scientific community then, he was laughed off. he found himself in a situation he had expected.Like Barry Marshall who had to drink a petri dish of bacteria which he extracted from a patient with peptic ulcer, and get horribly sick to prove that his theory conformed to Koch's postulates. Guess Capecchi had the last laugh, with his army of knockouts beside him keeping heart, nerve and sinew and allowance for the doubting too of the bourgeois scientific junta.

Mangesh keeps putting up interesting status messages on his Gtalk messenger. One of them a quote by Einstein: " It is as if in punishment of my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself"

Am I romanticizing the karma cola here- asking for adversity in a masochistic hoping for the pleasure of the success to follow?Post hoc ergo propter hoc? There's the American way of rationalizing this that maybe he did not succeed because of the adversity. Maybe he succeeded despite the adversity.
Capecchi has his take on this: There is no control group,here, that lets you measure what you missed.