Immigrant of the Day: Mario Renato Capecchi (Italy)

Mario Renato Capecchi (born 1937) is a molecular geneticist and a co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

Born in Italy, Mario Capecchi’s mother was sent to the Dachau concentration camp during WW II for pamphleteering and belonging to an anti-Fascist group. As a four-and-a-half year old, Capecchi was left to fend for himself on the streets of northern Italy for four years, living in orphanages and roving through towns with other groups of homeless children. He almost died of malnutrition. When freed from Dachau by the U.S. military, his mother began a year-long search for her son. She finally found him in a hospital bed in Bologna, ill with a fever and subsisting on a daily bowl of chicory coffee and bread crust. She took him to Rome, where he had his first bath in six years.

In 1946, Capecchi and his mother moved to Pennsylvania. He graduated from a Quaker boarding school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1956. He received his B.S. in chemistry and physics in 1961 from Antioch College in Ohio. He received his Ph.D. in biophysics in 1967 from Harvard University with a doctoral thesis under the tutelage of James D. 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 of Biochemistry at Harvard School of Medicine. 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 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mario Capecchi is particularly well known for his pioneering work in gene targeting of the mouse embryo-derived stem cells which enabled other transgenic technologies including cloning and genetic modification. This work earned Capecchi the 2007 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology. He has been honored with many other awards for his research.

KJ