Mario Capecchi: The Nobel-Prize Winning True Superhero of Biology

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.
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A remarkable family

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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