Nobel awarded for medicine

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Two American scientists and a Briton won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.

The widely used process has helped scientists use mice to study heart disease, diabetes, cancer, cystic fibrosis and other diseases.

The prize is shared by Mario Capecchi, 70, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies, 82, a native of Britain now at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; and Sir Martin Evans, 66, of Cardiff University in Wales.

The Nobel is a particularly striking achievement for Capecchi. A native of Italy, he was separated from his mother at age 4 when she was taken to the Dachau concentration camp as a political prisoner during World War II.

For four years, Capecchi lived on the street or in orphanages, “and most of the time hungry,” he recalled in a University of Utah publication in 1997. Malnutrition sent him to a hospital where his mother found him on his ninth birthday. Within two weeks they left for the United States, where he went to school for the first time, starting in third grade despite not knowing English.

The three scientists were honored for a technique called gene targeting, which lets scientists deactivate or modify particular genes in mice. That in turn lets them study how those genes affect health and disease.

To use this technique, researchers introduce a genetic change into mouse embryonic stem cells. These cells are then injected into mouse embryos. The mice born from these embryos are bred with others, to produce offspring with altered genes.

The first mice with genes manipulated in this way were announced in 1989. More than 10,000 genes in mice have been studied with the technique, the Nobel committee said. That’s about half the genes the rodents have.

“Gene targeting has pervaded all fields of biomedicine. Its impact on the understanding of gene function and its benefits to mankind will continue to increase over many years to come,” said the citation for the $1.54 million prize.

Scientists are also attempting to do this genetic manipulation in human embryonic cells to create a basic research tool, said John Gearhart, a stem cell expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The idea is to make cells with disease-related gene mutations so they can be studied in the laboratory. That could give clues about how the disease develops, and serve as a screening tool for potential therapies, he said.

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