It is often observed that many prizewinning scientists have difficult childhoods involving illness and hardship, providing motivation in later life to search for cures and improve conditions for others. Few laureates, however, can lay claim to a background as challenging as Mario Capecchi’s, and this may also help explain his exceptional achievements in later life.
Mario did not initially seem destined for hardship. He was born in Verona, Northern Italy in 1937, and his mother, Lucy Ramberg, was a beautiful and accomplished poet from a wealthy family. His grandmother, Lucy Dodd, had emigrated to Italy from the United States at the end of the 19th century, with ambitions to become an impressionist painter. She was highly successful, while also establishing a thriving finishing school for young women in a substantial Florentine villa and the younger Lucy grew up surrounded by beautiful gardens, attended by doting servants and private tutors. She was fluent in half a dozen languages and graduated from the Sorbonne in Paris before becoming a lecturer there, in languages and literature.
In 1937, Lucy moved to Bolzano, in the Italian Alps. She had an affair with an officer in the Italian Air Force and became pregnant. Mario later wrote: “This was a time of extremes, turmoil and juxtapositions of opposites. They had a passionate love affair, and my mother wisely chose not to marry him. This took a great deal of courage on her part. It embittered my father.”
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It is often observed that many prizewinning scientists have difficult childhoods involving illness and hardship, providing motivation in later life to search for cures and improve conditions for others. Few laureates, however, can lay claim to a background as challenging as Mario Capecchi’s, and this may also help explain his exceptional achievements in later life.
Mario did not initially seem destined for hardship. He was born in Verona, Northern Italy in 1937, and his mother, Lucy Ramberg, was a beautiful and accomplished poet from a wealthy family. His grandmother, Lucy Dodd, had emigrated to Italy from the United States at the end of the 19th century, with ambitions to become an impressionist painter. She was highly successful, while also establishing a thriving finishing school for young women in a substantial Florentine villa and the younger Lucy grew up surrounded by beautiful gardens, attended by doting servants and private tutors. She was fluent in half a dozen languages and graduated from the Sorbonne in Paris before becoming a lecturer there, in languages and literature.
In 1937, Lucy moved to Bolzano, in the Italian Alps. She had an affair with an officer in the Italian Air Force and became pregnant. Mario later wrote: “This was a time of extremes, turmoil and juxtapositions of opposites. They had a passionate love affair, and my mother wisely chose not to marry him. This took a great deal of courage on her part. It embittered my father.”
The outbreak of World War II spelled danger for Lucy, who had been a member of a group of outspoken anti-fascist Parisian artists and poets called the Bohemians. Her poetry was primarily published in German, and she was a well-known opponent of the Nazi regime. In the spring of 1941, German officers came to the chalet where Lucy and Mario lived and arrested Lucy. Mario later wrote, “This is one of my earliest memories. My mother had taught me to speak both Italian and German, and I was quite aware of what was happening. I sensed that I would not see my mother again for many years, if ever.”
Lucy had been expecting her capture and had made provisions for Mario’s future. She had sold most of her possessions and given the proceeds to a local family so that they would take care of Mario. He lived on their farm following Lucy’s arrest, but then, as he puts it: “For reasons that have never been clear to me, my mother’s money ran out after one year and, at age 4½, I set off on my own.”
The beautiful town of Bolzano, nestled among the Alps
Street gangs and orphanages
Mario’s destination was Reggio Emilia, the town where his father lived, some 160 miles to the south, but over the next four years, he spent no more than three weeks in his father’s care. As he later wrote, “The question has been raised why I didn’t live with him for a much longer period. The reason was that he was extremely abusive. Amidst all of the horrors of war, perhaps the most difficult for me to accept as a child was having a father who was brutal to me.”
He spent some months living in orphanages, especially toward the end of the war, but for most of the next four years Mario chose to live in the streets, joining gangs of other homeless children. He says of this time that “My recollections of those four years are vivid but not continuous, rather like a series of snapshots. Some of them are brutal beyond description, others more palatable.” By the end of this period, he had contracted typhoid and had been in a children’s hospital for some time, but the war was finally over, and things were about to improve for little Mario.
Reggio Emilia, where a destitute Mario lived a dangerous life on the streets
A birthday present
On his ninth birthday, with dramatic timing that Mario believes was ‘by design’, his mother arrived at the hospital. She had been incarcerated near Munich and had been searching for Mario since being liberated the previous year. Mario believes she was held at Dachau, but no records exist to show this. Lucy refused to discuss her years in captivity until her death, many years later.
The pair then left for America to stay with Mario’s uncle, Edward Ramberg, a brilliant physicist who contributed to the early development of electron microscopy and color television. Edward and his wife, Sarah, were Quakers, and they lived on a commune in Pennsylvania where Mario was both educated and supported in his recovery after his traumatic experiences.
Capecchi writes movingly of this time, “The contrast between living primarily alone in the streets of Italy and living in an intensely cooperative and supportive community in Pennsylvania was enormous. Time was needed for healing and for erasing the images of war from my mind. I would go to sleep tossing and turning with such force that by morning the sheets were torn and the bed frame broken. This activity disturbed my aunt and uncle to the extent that Sarah would take me from one child psychologist or psychiatrist, to another. These professionals were not very helpful, but the support of the community was.”
True Superhero Mario Capecchi in happier times
The search for a better future
With the support he received in Pennsylvania, Mario flourished, developing a passion for mathematics and physics. He also admired Quaker values, and these informed his choices when he enrolled in a small college in Ohio.
“I carried the charge of making this a better, more equitable world for all people. Most of the problems appeared to be political, so I started out majoring in political science. However, I soon became disillusioned with political science since there appeared to be little science to this discipline, so I switched to the physical sciences - physics and chemistry.”
However, even this did not satisfy Capecchi’s desire for progress, as much of what he was studying struck him as rooted in the past. He finally found what he was searching for on an exchange program at MIT; the entirely new discipline (in the 1950s) of molecular biology, in which he would make the discoveries that would help him achieve his goals.
Knockout mice
Capecchi’s scientific career is filled with notable achievements, but the one for which he is best known, and received a Nobel prize, was the creation of what is called a ‘knockout mouse’. This is a genetically modified mouse in which one of the genes has been deactivated - or knocked out - allowing researchers to observe differences from normal behavior or physiology, and infer the function of that gene. This has led to significant advancements in the study and modeling of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, substance abuse, anxiety, aging, Parkinson’s disease, and many different kinds of cancer.
Winning the Nobel in 2007 led to one further surprise in Capecchi’s life; the interest generated in his formative years led journalists to discover that he had a half-sister, two years younger than him, who was given up for adoption as a one-year-old. Mario would later write: “Most recently I had the opportunity to meet my half-sister. She was a very nice person, as a sister should be“.
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