Mario Capecchi was born inVerona, Italy, as the only child of Luciano Capecchi and Lucy Ramberg, an Italian-born[13] daughter of American-bornImpressionist painter Lucy Dodd Ramberg and German archaeologist Walter Ramberg. His parents weren't married, and due to the chaos in Europe caused byWorld War II, the story of his early life is remarkable, but the details are unclear. In 1941 he and his mother were living nearBolzano, about 160 miles north of his father inReggio Emilia when his mother was arrested and deported for pamphleteering and belonging to an anti-Fascist group.[14] Prior to her arrest[15] she had made contingency plans by selling her belongings and giving the proceeds to a nearby peasant family to care for her child. However, it was not long before Mario ended up on the streets of Bolzano.[16][17] In July 1942, a few months before his fifth birthday, Italian records suggest he was reunited with his father in Reggio Emilia, which Mario did confirm but stated that he stayed with his father for only for a few brief periods[18] and that he mostly lived on the streets until he was placed in an orphanage towards the end of the war.
Mario almost died of malnutrition. His mother survived the war in Germany (part of the reason the details of his early life are unclear is that she would never talk about her experiences), and when it ended she began a year-long search for him. She finally found him on his ninth birthday in a hospital bed in Reggio Emilia ill with a fever and subsisting on a daily bowl ofchicory coffee and bread crust. She took him to Rome, where he had his first bath since he had left her care and where, with money sent by his uncle,Edward Ramberg, an American physicist atRCA, they made arrangements to depart to the United States. He and his mother moved toPennsylvania to live at an "intentionally cooperative community" calledBryn Gweled,[19] which had been co-founded by his uncle. (Capecchi's other maternal uncle, Walter Ramberg, was also a prominent American physicist[20]). He graduated fromGeorge School, a Quaker boarding school inBucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1956.[15]
Capecchi received hisBachelor of Science inchemistry andphysics in 1961 fromAntioch College inOhio. Capecchi came toMIT as a graduate student intending to study physics and mathematics,[21] but during the course of his studies, he became interested in molecular biology. His change of interest was driven by the preference of working with few scientists and conducting experiments that did not require the use of big machines. He subsequently transferred to Harvard to join the lab ofJames D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.[22] Capecchi received hisPhD inbiophysics in 1967[23] fromHarvard University, with his doctoral thesis completed under the tutelage of Watson.
Capecchi was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University from 1967 to 1969. In 1969 he became an assistant professor in the Department ofBiochemistry atHarvard Medical School. He was promoted to associate professor in 1971. In 1973 he joined the faculty at the University of Utah. Since 1988 Capecchi has also been an investigator of theHoward Hughes Medical Institute. He is a member of theNational Academy of Sciences. He has given a talk forDuke University's Program in Genetics and Genomics as part of their Distinguished Lecturer Series.[24] He was the speaker for the 2010 Racker Lectures in Biology & Medicine and Cornell Distinguished Lecture in Cell and Molecular Biology atCornell University.[25] He is a member of theItaly-USA Foundation.
After the Nobel committee publicly announced that Capecchi was awarded the Nobel prize, an Austrian woman named Marlene Bonelli claimed that Capecchi was her long-lost half-brother.[26]In May 2008, Capecchi met with Bonelli, then 69, in northern Italy, and confirmed that she was his sister.[27]
Capecchi was awarded the Nobel prize for creating aknockout mouse. This is a mouse, created by genetic engineering and in vitro fertilization, in which a particular gene has been turned off.[28] For this work, Capecchi was awarded the 2007 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology, along withMartin Evans andOliver Smithies, who also contributed.
Capecchi has also pursued a systematic analysis of the mouseHox gene family. This gene family plays a key role in the control ofembryonic development in allmulticellular animals. They determine the placement of cellular development in the proper order along the axis of the body from head to toe.
^Mansour, S. L.; Thomas, K. R.; Capecchi, M. R. (1988). "Disruption of the proto-oncogene int-2 in mouse embryo-derived stem cells: A general strategy for targeting mutations to non-selectable genes".Nature.336 (6197):348–352.Bibcode:1988Natur.336..348M.doi:10.1038/336348a0.PMID3194019.S2CID2997260.
including the Nobel Lecture on 7 December 2007Gene Targeting 1977 - Present
