Mario Capecchi

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Mario Capecchi, 2013

Mario Renato Capecchi (born October 6, 1937 in Verona ) is an American geneticist of Italian origin and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007. He was awarded together with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies for research on the knockout mouse .

Childhood and youth

Mario Capecchi's mother, Lucy Ramberg, was a poet who published her poems in German. His father, Luciano Capecchi, was an officer in the Italian Air Force . The parents weren't married. His grandmother, Lucy Dodd, was an American from Oregon who lived as a painter in Florence and married the German archaeologist Walter Ramberg, who died in the First World War . The mother had studied literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. She later joined a group of poets who were openly in opposition to fascism and national socialism. In 1937 his mother came to Tyrol and lived in Wolfsgruben near Bozen . When Mario was three and a half years old in the spring of 1941, his mother was arrested by German officials. Mario assumed that she was sent to the concentration camp in Dachau, but this could not be confirmed by recent studies.

He first lived in a Tyrolean farming family. When his care allowance was insufficient there, he lived partly as a street boy in Gangs and was deregistered by his father on July 18, 1942, to Reggio nell'Emilia , 160 km south of Bolzano. He was temporarily in an orphanage and most recently in a hospital in Reggio nell'Emilia with typhus and malnutrition. In spring 1945 the mother was released and looked for the boy, whom she found on his 9th birthday in 1946. Shortly afterwards, Mario and his mother started the voyage to the USA, which the uncle who lived there had organized and paid for. From then on he lived with uncle and aunt, Edward and Sarah Ramberg, both Quakers who belonged to a Quaker commune in Pennsylvania. His uncle was a physicist for quantum mechanics and played a key role in developing the television tubes. Immediately after his arrival in the Quaker community, he was accepted into the 3rd grade of a school, although he could not speak English. He later attended the George School, a high school in Philadelphia . He played a lot of sports, especially soccer, baseball, and wrestling.

Scientific career

After graduating from school, he studied at Antioch College , Ohio, and received a bachelor's degree (BS) in chemistry and physics in 1961 . He then went to Harvard University and received his PhD in biophysics in 1967 under the supervision of James D. Watson , the discoverer of the double helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid and Nobel Prize winner from 1962. Until 1969 he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. In the same year he became an assistant professor in the department of biochemistry of the medical faculty of the university. In 1971 he was appointed associate professor. Two years later he went to the University of Utah .

Together with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies, he received the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for research on the knockout mouse .

Publications (selection)

  • Molecular genetics of early Drosophila and mouse development , published in 1989, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, ISBN 0-87969-339-8 ,
  • The role of FGF4 and FGF8 in posterior development of the mouse embryo , with Anne M. Boulet; Developmental biology, San Diego Academic Press, 2008
  • Evolution of the mammary gland from the innate immune system with Claudia Vorbach and Josef M Penninger, BioEssays

Awards (selection)

Web links

Commons : Mario Capecchi  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

swell

  1. ↑ ChemBioChem - Wiley Online Library ; 2008 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co.KGaA, Weinheim; ChemBioChem 2008, 9, 1530-1543
  2. ↑ Molecular genetics of early Drosophila and mouse development on openlibrary.org
personal data
SURNAME Capecchi, Mario
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Capecchi, Mario Renato (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American geneticist of Italian origin
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Verona , Italy