Paul Krugman wins the Nobel Prize for Economics

Krugman made economics simple by bringing it from its arcane academic halls to the living room of the common man. Having been a long admirer of his books & columns in the New York Times for its blunt, incisive and persuasive style, I commend the committee for selecting him.

The other factor that has clearly favored his choice is the current economic climate. His fierce criticism of Prez. Bush , am sure, has stood him in good stead amidst the current wall street debris. Congrats Paul !

Dr.Capecchi - An inspirational tale

The Nobel Prize for Medicine were announced today and one of the winners was Dr.Capecchi . Read this inspirational tale about a boy who survived second world war on the streets , enrolled in school at the age of 12 and has now gone to win the Nobel Prize. Very inspiring !

Excerpt from Washington Post , " He was only 3 when his mother, Lucy Ramberg, a member of a group of artists known as the Bohemians, was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany as a political prisoner for pamphleteering against Nazism and fascism. Anticipating the arrest, Ramberg, who never married Capecchi's father, an officer in the Italian air force, sold her possessions, giving the money to a peasant family that she asked to care for her son. But the money ran out in a year."They didn't have the resources to keep me and maintain their own family," the scientist said in a telephone interview yesterday. "So I went on the streets."

Capecchi moved from town to town, hungry most of the time and occasionally living in orphanages or traveling with gangs of other homeless children who stole food from carts while other members of the group distracted the vendors. "Just surviving from day to day pretty much occupies your mind," he said in a 1997 interview with the Salt Lake Tribune.He spent years on the streets and nearly died of malnutrition in a hospital near Bologna, where he lay naked and feverish on a bed, existing on a daily bowl of chicory coffee and a small crust of bread. His mother, who was liberated from Dachau by U.S. troops in 1945, found him at the hospital after searching for more than a year. She showed up on his ninth birthday, carrying a Tyrolean outfit for him, complete with a small cap with a feather. She took him to Rome, where he had his first bath in six years."I still have the hat," he said in a 1996 lecture in Japan.

In 1946, Capecchi's uncle Edward Ramberg, a physicist living in a commune in Bucks County, Pa., sent money so that his sister and nephew could come live with his family in the United States."I was here one day, and the next day I went to my first school," Capecchi said. After attending Quaker schools through high school, Capecchi earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics from Antioch College in Ohio in 1961 and a doctorate in biophysics from Harvard University in 1967. At Harvard, he worked in the lab of molecular biologist James D. Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA.