‘Knockout mice’ and the school of hard knocks

A Nobel Prize-winning geneticist stopped by to visit with fifth- through eighth-graders from East Palo Alto and eastern Menlo Park last week.

Major topics were “knockout genetics,” the work for which Mario Capecchi, the 2007 Nobelist in Physiology or Medicine, is known — as well as the school of hard knocks, with which both Capecchi and students at Menlo Park’s Beechwood School are familiar.

The Italian-born Capecchi, now a professor and laboratory director at the University of Utah, lived for four years as a street child in Northern Italy during World War II, stealing food to survive.

Students at the private Beechwood School — all of whom are on virtually full scholarships — live in East Palo Alto and eastern Menlo Park, neighborhoods where the public high-school graduation rate hovers around 25 percent.

“A child is extremely resilient,” Capecchi told the Beechwood students about living as a street child from age 4-and-a-half to 9. “No matter what situation you put a child in, that’s the world. You accept whatever it is and do the best you can.

“The main thing is survival, just making it to the next day. You don’t question it; you simply do it. Fortunately, I survived, and I’m here and able to tell that story.”

Students’ questions ranged from the importance of genetic experiments on mice to the ethical treatment of lab animals, from how to survive on the streets to why Capecchi switched from Harvard University to the University of Utah.

Hoping for some budding scientists in the group, the Nobelist answered each with patience and humor.

“I’m going to try to talk you into becoming scientists because it’s a marvelous vocation, a marvelous job,” he said.

“What makes science exciting is it changes all the time. What we worked on five years ago is completely different from what we’re working on now and completely different from what we’ll be working on in five years.

“You get to choose what you work on, what you are curious about.”

Students were aware of Capecchi’s ground-breaking work with “knockout mice,” which he explained as the ability to remove a gene from a mouse and observe what happens.

“We called it that because it was something people could grasp,” he said. “They looked on it as knocking a gene out. We named it that, and now we’re stuck.”

Capecchi described his years as a street child.

“What was most important was getting food,” he said. “I had to steal the food. Nobody was going to give me the food. I was very good (at stealing the food). Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.

“I survived. Most of the kids actually didn’t.”

Capecchi’s American-born mother, a pamphleteer who had been sent to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich, spent a year searching for her son after the war, finally locating him in an Italian hospital for children being treated for malnutrition and typhoid.

She took him to Rome, where he had his first bath in years before sailing for America, where the mother had two brothers.

Capecchi entered school for the first time at the age of 9.

“The teachers told me I’d never learn to read because I was too old,” he said. “My aunt taught me to read starting at the age of 9.

“Then they said, ‘You can learn to read but you’ll never make it to college.'”

Capecchi graduated from Antioch College and received a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard.

“You do have people who will doubt what you can do,” he told the students. “The important thing is to have self-confidence to carry you through.

“If you have a good education, you can do anything.”

Capecchi’s visit to Beechwood was arranged through one of the school’s founders, Richard Jacobsen of Palo Alto, a University of Utah alumnus and benefactor.

As a scoutmaster some years ago, Jacobsen said he was surprised to find that some of the middle-school boys in his troop who were from East Palo Alto could barely read at first-grade level.

In 1984, Jacobsen and his commercial real-estate partners at WSJ Properties and their wives — Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley, Boyd and Jill Smith, and Richard and Sue Jacobsen — formed the California Family Foundation to assist families with education, housing and jobs.

Beechwood opened its doors in 1986 with 15 kindergarteners and 15 first-graders, meeting in two portable buildings next to the railroad tracks near the Onetta Harris Community Center.

Today the school serves 170 students from “kinder-prep” through eighth grade and is seeking to buy the site from the City of Menlo Park.

At Beechwood, Capecchi presented medals to 10 students honored for their ability “to overcome difficult situations and achieve academically.”

They are eighth-graders Jahdai Espinoza, Fernanda Pineda and Owens Smith; seventh-graders Bruno Hernandez, Jocelyn Higuera and D’Andre Stamper; sixth-graders Anglean Johnson and Jesse Velasquez; and fifth-graders Miguel Angel Angulo and Jessica Moreno.