Capecchi, Mario Renato, 1937–, American geneticist, b. Verona, Italy, Ph.D. Harvard, 1967. On the faculty at Harvard from 1967 to 1973, Capecchi became a professor at the Univ. of Utah School of Medicine in 1973 and also has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Institute since 1988. In 2007 he, along with Sir Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies, was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the development of gene targeting, a technology that enables the engineering of mice with mutations in any desired gene. Capecchi's work on the roles of specific genes in the development of mammalian organs has enabled the causes of a number of inborn human malformations to be determined.
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