Capecchi's path to Nobel started in streets

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Mario Capecchi, the Italian-born winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, got his earliest education in the school of hard knocks.

As a young child, Capecchi spent four years living on the streets in Italy after his mother was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp as a political prisoner.

"I was three and a half when she was taken to Dachau," said Capecchi, who was born in Verona in 1937.

"She put me with a peasant family in Italy because she thought I would be more likely to survive without her," he said in a telephone interview.

"Then, that money ran out, and I was in the streets from four and a half to age 9," he said, adding, "I won't tell you how I survived, but I broke a few rules."

He gave more harrowing details in a 1997 interview with the University of Utah.

"I headed south, sometimes living in the streets, sometimes joining gangs of other homeless children, sometimes living in orphanages and most of the time hungry," he said.

He spent the last year in the city of Reggio Emelia, hospitalized for malnutrition. Capecchi's mother found him there after searching for a year after the end of World War II and they made their way to the United States.