Prof. Dr. Mario Capecchi or how to go from being a homeless child to Nobel Prize winner

Mario Capecchi was one of the 3 scientists who were awarded the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 “for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells”. However, him winning the most prestigious prize in science was not the most impressive thing he did in his life. For reference in terms of level of difficulty, it is somewhere above winning a Nobel prize and below surviving academic politics. He overcame abject poverty and homelessness as a child, with his earliest memory of his mother being arrested by the Nazis, and became a well rounded and kind scientist and person.