3 Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Medicine

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Sir Martin Evans, Monday Oct. 8, 2007, seen in in Cambridge, England, following the announcement of the award. Evans and two Americans, Mario R. Capecchi, and Oliver Smithies, shared the Nobel Prize in medicine announced on Monday for groundbreaking stem-cell research on mice that helped establish the role of individual genes in human ailments including diabetes, heart disease and cancer. (AP Photo/Jason Bye, PA) A British scientist was one of three people awarded a Nobel Prize today for work on "knockout mice" that revolutionised biomedicine. Sir Martin Evans, professor of mammalian genetics at Cardiff University, played a key role in the creation of genetically engineered mice that replicate human diseases. See PA Story SCIENCE Nobel. Photo credit should read: Jason Bye/PA Wire (Jason Bye - AP)

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 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 modifying 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 at age 3 when the Gestapo took her to the Dachau concentration camp as a political prisoner in 1941. His mother, a poet, and his father, an Italian military officer, were not married.

Capecchi spent a year with a peasant family, until the money his mother 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 and his mother 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 9th 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.