...He was only 3 when his mother, Lucy Ramberg, a member of a group of artists known as the Bohemians, was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany as a political prisoner for pamphleteering against Nazism and Fascism. Anticipating the arrest, Ramberg, who never married Capecchi's father, an officer in the Italian air force, sold her possessions, giving the money to a peasant family that she asked to care for her son. But the money ran out in a year. "They didn't have the resources to keep me and maintain their own family," the scientist said in a telephone interview Monday. "So I went on the streets." Capecchi moved from town to town, hungry most of the time and occasionally living in orphanages or traveling with gangs of other homeless children who stole food from carts while other members of the group distracted the vendors. "Just surviving from day to day pretty much occupies your mind," he said in a 1997 interview with the Salt Lake Tribune. He spent years on the streets but nearly died of malnutrition in a hospital near Bologna where he lay naked and feverish on a bed, existing on a daily bowl of chicory coffee and a small crust of bread. His mother, who was liberated from Dachau by U.S. soldiers in 1945, found him at the hospital after searching for more than a year. She showed up on his 9th birthday, carrying a Tyrolean outfit for him, complete with a small cap with a feather. She took him to Rome, where he had his first bath in six years. "I still have the hat," he said in a 1996 lecture in Japan. In 1946, Capecchi's uncle Edward Ramberg, a physicist living in a commune in Bucks County, Pa., sent money so that his sister and nephew could come live with his family in the United States. After attending Quaker schools through high school, Capecchi earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics from Antioch College in Ohio in 1961 and a doctorate in biophysics from Harvard University in 1967. At Harvard, he worked in the lab of molecular biologist James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. Capecchi and the other researchers were honored for work they did in the 1980s investigating how mice genes can be manipulated to better understand and model serious illnesses in humans such as cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease. Working largely independently, Capecchi and Smithies developed a method known as "gene targeting" that allowed them to inactivate or modify genes in mice. Meanwhile, Evans discovered that stem cells could be extracted from mice embryos and cultivated to grow into any cell. Applying the new method to Evans' cells, the scientists were able to introduce specific gene modifications in mouse embryos, creating animals with human diseases such as cystic fibrosis. Such mice, now commonly used in laboratory experiments, could help researchers better understand the origins of disease, and find treatments and medicine. "If you want to make a model of a specific human disease, you can," Smithies said Monday in a telephone interview. He added: "You can make a mouse to make it have that disease, and then you have something which you can try to help cure or at least alleviate it." The groundbreaking work is considered to have laid the scientific foundation for efforts to eradicate some diseases in humans by manipulating genes.

This is the amazing story of one of today's recipients of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Mario Capecchi.