NEW YORK – As a child in Italy during World War II, he lived for years on the streets and in orphanages. Six decades later, as a scientist in the United States, Mario Capecchi has joined two other researchers in winning the Nobel Prize in medicine.
Their work led to a powerful and widely used technique to manipulate genes in mice, which has helped scientists study heart disease, diabetes, cancer, cystic fibrosis and other diseases.
The $1.54 million prize was awarded Monday to Capecchi, 70, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies, 82, a native of Britain now at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; and Sir Martin J. Evans, 66, of Cardiff University in Wales.
Their “gene-targeting” technique lets scientists deactivate or modify individual genes in mice and observe how those changes affect the animals. That in turn gives clues about what those genes do in human health and disease.
The work has had “a revolutionary effect on the ability to understand how genes work,” said Richard Woychik, director of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, a center for mouse genetics.
The prize is a particularly striking accomplishment for Capecchi (pronounced kuh-PEK-ee). A native of Italy, he was separated from his mother, a poet, at age 3 when the Gestapo took her to the Dachau concentration camp as a political prisoner in 1941. He spent a year with a peasant family, until the money she had left for his care ran out.
At age 4, “I started wandering the streets,” he recalled Monday. For about four years, he lived on the streets or in orphanages, and he ended up in a hospital with malnutrition.
Dachau was liberated in 1945; his mother had survived.
“Then she set out to find me,” searching through hospital records. “I was in a hospital, and when they keep you in a hospital, they didn’t want you to run around. They took your clothes away. She came and bought me an outfit.”
She showed up on Capecchi’s ninth birthday. Soon thereafter, “we were on a boat to America. … I literally expected roads to be paved with gold. What I found was, it was a land of opportunity,” he said.
In the United States, he went to school for the first time, starting in third grade despite not knowing English.
The three prize-winning scientists mostly worked separately, although they exchanged information about their research. Evans identified embryonic stem cells in mice, while the gene-targeting technique used on those cells came from work by Capecchi and Smithies.
Capecchi’s work has uncovered the roles of genes involved in organ development in mammals, the committee said. Evans developed strains of gene-altered mice to study cystic fibrosis, and Smithies created strains to study such conditions as high blood pressure and heart disease.
The medicine prize was the first of the six prestigious awards to be announced this year. The others are chemistry, physics, literature, peace and economics.
