Best Known As: Scientist

Gist:  Mario Renato Capecchi (born 6 October 1937) is an Italian-born American 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, which he joined in 1973.

Life Facts:  Mario Capecchi was born in the Italian city of Verona in 1937. His father was Luciano Capecchi, an Italian airman who would be later reported as missing in action while manning an anti-aircraft gun in the Western Desert Campaign, daughter of Impressionist painter Lucy Dodd Ramberg and German archaeologist Walter Ramberg. During World War II, his mother was sent to the Dachau concentration camp as punishment for pamphleteering and belonging to an anti-Fascist group. Prior to her arrest she had made contingency plans by selling her belongings and giving the proceeds to a peasant family near Bolzano to provide housing for her son. However, after one year, the money was exhausted and the family was unable to care for him. At four-and-a-half years old he was left to fend for himself on the streets of northern Italy for the next four years, living in various orphanages and roving through towns with groups of other homeless children.

He almost died of malnutrition. His mother, meanwhile, had been freed from Dachau and began a year-long search for him. She finally found him in a hospital bed in Reggio Emilia,

In 1946 his uncle, Edward Ramberg, which had been co-founded by his uncle. (Capecchi's other maternal uncle, Walter Ramberg, was also an American physicist who served as the tenth president of the Society for Experimental Stress Analysis.) He graduated from George School, a Quaker boarding school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1956.

Mario Capecchi received his Bachelor of Science in chemistry and physics in 1961 from Antioch College in Ohio. Capecchi came to MIT as a graduate student intending to study physics and mathematics, but during the course of his studies, he 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. Capecchi received his Ph.D. in biophysics in 1967 from Harvard 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 of Biochemistry at Harvard 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 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has given a talk for Duke University's Program in Genetics and Genomics as part of their Distinguished Lecturer Series.

After the Nobel committee publicly announced that Capecchi had won the Nobel prize, an Austrian woman named Marlene Bonelli claimed that Capecchi was her long-lost half-brother.

In May 2008, Capecchi met with Bonelli, 69, in northern Italy, and confirmed that she was his sister.