Mario R. Capecchi

Dr. Mario Capecchi is a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies for pioneering work on the development of gene targeting in mouse embryo-derived stem (ES) cells, creating "knockout" or "designer" mice with mutations in any desired gene. His success is all the more remarkable because of his early childhood struggles for survival. Dr. Capecchi was born in Verona, Italy, to unmarried parents. In 1941, during World War II, his mother was arrested and deported from their home in Bolzano for anti-Fascist activity. Prior to her arrest, she had made plans for a nearby family to care for her son. However, four-year-old Mario ended up on the streets of the city. A few months before his fifth birthday, Mario was reunited with his father, but stayed with him only for a few brief periods, and lived mostly on the streets until he was placed in an orphanage towards the end of the war. He nearly died of malnutrition. His mother survived the war in Germany, and undertook a year-long search for Mario. She finally found him on his ninth birthday, sick in a hospital in Reggio Emilia. With funds sent by his uncle Edward Ramberg, an American physicist, Mario and his mother emigrated to the USA, settling in Pennsylvania. He graduated from George School, a Quaker boarding school, and received his B.S. in chemistry and physics in 1961 from Antioch College in Ohio. Capecchi went to MIT as a graduate student, and there became interested in molecular biology. He subsequently transferred to Harvard to join the lab of James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Dr. Capecchi received his PhD in biophysics in 1967 from Harvard University. In 1969 he became an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Harvard Medical School, and in 1973 he joined the faculty at the University of Utah. In his research, Dr. Capecchi has also pursued a systematic analysis of the mouse Hox gene family, which plays a key role in determining the placement of cellular development in the proper order along the axis of the body from head to toe in all multicellular animals.