Ex-Bucks Man One of Nobel Prize
By Tracy Jordan, The Morning Call, Allentown, Pa.
Oct. 10–A former Bucks County man was among three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for his work altering genes in mice for medical research.
Mario Capecchi, formerly of Southampton Township and a 1956 graduate of the George School in Newtown, got the award with Oliver Smithies of North Carolina and Martin Evans of the United Kingdom.
The scientists determined how to inactivate single genes in mice to reproduce human maladies so mice could be used in the pharmaceutical industry to test new drugs.
Capecchi, 70, a geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and Smithies, 82, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, showed how a mouse’s genetic information can be permanently changed, creating animals that pass down disease traits to their offspring.
“This is staggering,” Capecchi said in an interview about the 3 a.m. phone call he got from the Nobel Foundation of Sweden. He said the news came as a “a huge surprise.”
In 2001, the discovery won the trio the Albert Lasker Award, which frequently precedes a Nobel Prize.
Capecchi was born in Italy, where he wandered the streets for four years with other war orphans after Nazis imprisoned his mother in a concentration camp. His mother found him after World War II and brought him to live with his aunt and uncle in Bucks County at age 9.
According to a 2001 article in a publication from the George School, the family settled with Edward and Sarah Ramberg in Bryn Gweled, a cooperative community in Upper Southampton Township. Capecchi’s life story was featured in the school’s publication before his daughter Misha graduated in 2002.
In the article, Capecchi said he was bullied as an Italian immigrant in public school. At the George School, a private college prep school founded by Quakers in 1893, Capecchi said he no longer had to hide his intelligence and was able to pursue learning.
Capecchi credits James D. Watson, the 1962 Nobel laureate in medicine who supervised his thesis at Harvard, for sparking his interests in genetic research. Evans, director of the School of Biosciences and professor of mammalian genetics at Cardiff University in Wales, laid the basis for the American’s research.
More than 500 mouse models have been developed since the late 1980s, but U.S. drugmakers anticipate spending $50 million over the next five years to make more models. Use of the animals, available from companies such as Charles River Laboratories Inc. in Wilmington, Mass., has become routine.
“It is absolutely clear this opened a whole new level in research,” said Anna Wobus, an embryologist at the Leibniz Institute in Gatersleben, Germany.
At first, the scientists inactivated genes to determine what they were responsible for, prompting the terminology “knockout mice.” As the science became more sophisticated, researchers learned to mute, blunt or amplify genes to replicate human diseases in the animals, letting them be used to screen potential new medicines.
Knockout mice were key, for instance, in development of Novartis’ Gleevec cancer drug.
“Gene targeting in mice has pervaded all fields of biomedicine,” the Nobel Foundation said in the statement. “Its impact on the understanding of gene function and its benefits to mankind will continue to increase over many years to come.”
The three scientists will share the $1.54 million award. They are the first Nobel prizes awarded to each of their universities.
Capecchi is the second George School alum to win a Nobel Prize. Kenneth Wilson, a 1952 graduate, won for physics in 1982.
Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 and the first prizes were awarded the following year.
Bloomberg News Service contributed to this report.
—–
To see more of The Morning Call, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.mcall.com.
Copyright (c) 2007, The Morning Call, Allentown, Pa.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.