Mario Capecchi

Italian-born Nobel Prize winner, distinguished American professor, researcher and recipient of many international awards for his work on gene targeting. Describing himself as a husband, father and then scientist, his work aims to target genes for the understanding, treatment and prevention of disease.

Capecchi is the child of an American mother and an Italian airman. His mother, Lucy Ramberg, was the child of an American artist who opened a school in Florence, Italy and a German archeologist. Caught up in the European political scene of the mid-to-late 1930s, Lucy became involved with the Bohemians, the artists, literati and intellectuals who protested the Fascist and Nazi political movements. In northern Italy she met Capecchi’s father, an Italian Air Force officer who would go missing in Libya. She herself was captured by the Nazis in 1941 and imprisoned in Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp, but not before she left her only child with financial provision in the care of friends. Within a year, the money had run out and Mario, age 4, was left to his own devices. He spent the next five years wandering from town to town, foraging for food and shelter with other homeless children, spending time in orphanages or on the streets. Suffering from severe malnutrition, fever and the ill effects of physical and emotional trauma, he was hospitalized in such poor condition that he was not expected to live. Having been liberated from Dachau at the war’s end, his mother spent a year looking for him. On his ninth birthday she located him in the hospital. Tormented by her own unspeakable experiences, she took him to Pennsylvania to live with her brother, Edward Ramberg, and his wife, in a commune near Philadelphia.

Capecchi spoke no English when he arrived in the United States but attended a Quaker school where social conscience and creative learning were emphasized.