Today is May 20 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you dare to fail greatly?”
Italian-born American molecular geneticist Mario Renato Capecchi dared to fail greatly and in doing so achieved greatness. Capecchi was the only child of an abusive father and a caring mother. When Capecchi was around three years of age, German officers arrested his mother and sent her to a concentration camp, leaving Capecchi to fend for himself.
For a time he lived with a family friend but when money ran out to support him, young Capecchi wandered around the streets of wartime Italy for several years. He “survived on scraps, joined gangs and drifted in and out of orphanages, and eventually had to be hospitalized for a year probably due to typhoid.” After five six years of being apart, Capecchi was reunited with his mother. With the help of relatives they moved to the United States where Capecchi enrolled a Quaker boarding school.
He would eventually graduate from Antioch College and then enroll in MIT’s graduate program to study physics and mathematics. While at MIT he became interested in molecular biology and transferred to Harvard to join the lab of James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Capecchi received his PhD in biophysics in 1967 and until 1973 held various faculty positions at Harvard but grew increasingly alarmed at its results-driven environment.
Despite objections from Watson, who once quipped, “Capecchi accomplished more as a graduate student than most scientists accomplish in a life time and that he would be fucking crazy to pursue his studies anywhere other than in the cutting-edge intellectual atmosphere of Harvard.”
Capecchi left Harvard to join a new department at the University of Utah in 1973. He believed that the short-term gratification environment at Harvard limited his ability to breathe if he was to do great work.
Robert Kennedy noted “only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” Capecchi dared greatly and would go on to win the Nobel Prize and become a distinguished professor of human genetics and biology at the University Of Utah School Of Medicine.
How often do you dare to fail greatly?