Capecchi Heads to Sweden
By Lois M. Collins Deseret Morning News
Editor’s note: Award-winning Deseret Morning News writer Lois M. Collins travels to Sweden this week to cover the awarding of the Nobel Prize in medicine to Mario Capecchi, distinguished U. professor of human genetics and biology. This is the first of her reports.
When Mario Capecchi arrives in Sweden this afternoon for the weeklong festivities leading up to receiving a Nobel Prize in medicine Monday, I’ll be right behind him — about 29 rows on a very large airplane, in fact.
I’ve been assured by the dignitary assigned to escort him, though, that he can ditch me at customs, where he gets special treatment running the gantlet and will be finished in a matter of minutes. That’s what happens when you receive one of the world’s most prestigious honors.
I will clear customs, well, when I clear it.
For the next week, I’ll be tagging after him whenever he’ll let me — and writing about whatever strikes my fancy when he won’t.
I’ve been accredited to attend the awards ceremony and the banquet, and I’ll be there for his Nobel lecture and introduction to the world press as a Nobelist. But the honorees also have events where reporters cannot go — including dinner with Swedish royalty.
Capecchi, distinguished University of Utah professor of human genetics and biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, is being honored for his work in gene targeting. His method of knocking out specific genes is a major boon to research in disease process and potential treatment. The two men with whom he shares the award — Oliver Smithies and Sir Martin Evans — were also honored for work with mice gene manipulation. Smithies, too, found a way to target specific genes. And Evans used embryonic stem cell cultures to take the research from a cellular level into the animal itself, according to the Nobel Foundation.
In the interview the foundation conducted after he was notified that he’d won the Nobel Prize, Capecchi called himself “a second generation” Nobelist because he’d had the good fortune to study under two previous Nobel Prize winners while he was at Harvard: Dr. James Watson (medicine, 1962) and Walter Gilbert (chemistry, 1980).
I started my research a couple of weeks ago, beginning with things that would affect me. That’s how I know it’s freezing cold right now in Stockholm and the sun’s only going to make its daily appearance between 7:45 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Brrrr.
The prize has a fascinating history. It was created by inventor, scientist, philanthropist, poet and pacifist Alfred Nobel in the will he wrote in 1895, a year before he died. It funded the annual awards and designated institutions to select the winners, who were to be chosen without regard to nationality.
Nobel had made his vast fortune by creating dynamite, after years of experimenting with nitroglycerin. Several people, including his little brother, died during his efforts to make it stable enough to handle.
His executors had a four-year battle convincing Nobel’s relatives, the named institutions who were to select the winners and the various countries involved to honor the will’s terms.
E-mail: lois@desnews.com
(c) 2007 Deseret News (Salt Lake City). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.