This year’s Nobel prize season has kicked off. The first winners were announced this morning: Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies share the Physiology or Medicine prize “for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells”. This is effectively a re-run of the 2001 Lasker Award, which was given to the same trio for the same work on ‘knockout mice’ (Nature). Smithies wrote about the award of this prize in Nature Medicine at the time.
Toolmakers—and I suspect that the three of us being honored by the Lasker Foundation fit into this category—are fortunate people. They see problems, invent tools to solve them and enjoy the solutions, which often demonstrate new principles that were not part of the original thought. As a bonus, they also enjoy the vicarious pleasure of seeing other people use the same tools to solve very different problems. Yet the invention of an effective scientific tool is rarely an isolated event; there are often many prior experiences that trigger the inventive thought, and there may be various unexpected additional problems to solve before the toolmaker can bring a nascent idea into practice.
Capecchi’s amazing life story was detailed in a Nature feature in 2004. There’s a relevant extract below the fold:
Capecchi’s was one of two groups — the other led by Oliver Smithies, then at the University of Wisconsin — that a few years later showed that a dysfunctional copy of a mammalian gene will, on rare occasions, line up with and replace the normal version, in a process called ‘homologous recombination’
Knockout mice are created by performing this trick in mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells. The transformed cells are injected into embryos, and breeding from the resulting mice produces animals that carry the disabled target gene in all of their cells.
Martin Evans, then at the University of Cambridge, UK, had by the mid-1980s isolated mouse ES cells and showed that they could be incorporated into a developing embryo to create a ‘chimaeric’ animal. Capecchi demonstrated that homologous recombination also happens in ES cells, and developed efficient methods to select the tiny proportion of cells in a culture to have undergone this transformation6. The stage was set for the debut of targeted knockout mice, first described in 1989 and 1990 by groups including those led by Capecchi and Smithies.
And here’s a more colourful one:
Capecchi’s life story is humbling. Born in Verona in 1937, he was the product of a brief relationship between Lucy Ramberg, a poet, and Luciano Capecchi, an Italian air-force pilot. Nearly four years later, his mother — who was one of the Bohemians, a group of artists outspoken in their opposition to the Nazis — was taken away by the Gestapo and interned in the Dachau concentration camp.
Before her arrest, Capecchi’s mother sold all her belongings and used the money to arrange for a peasant family to care for him. But for reasons Capecchi has never understood, the cash soon ran out. At just four-and-a-half years of age, he was turned out onto the streets. Although he is happy to talk in general terms about his early life, Capecchi refuses to be drawn into the grim specifics. “The reality was brutal and there is little to be gained from recounting the details.”
Kudos to M. William Lensch who predicted this victory on his Nature Network blog last year. Basic coverage of the award has appeared so far in PA, AP, and the Guardian. We’ll update with a pick of further coverage when longer pieces come online.
UPDATES
Here’s the hugely detailed press release.
A substantial piece from Reuters has appeared.
UPDATES PART 2
The stories are coming thick and fast. The South Wales Echo has Evans declaring his Nobel “a boyhood dream come true”, a quote also picked up by the Western Mail. The UK’s prime minister Gordon Brown said it was “a proud day for Sir Martin, for Cardiff University and for the country” (The Guardian and others).
In North Carolina in the US the News and Observer is more interested in local man Smithies, from whom it has the great quote: “I’ve always said if I were to die somewhere, which certainly will happen, it might as well be at the bench because that’s where I’m happy.” His university paper the Daily Tar Heel also covers the story, although it appears more concerned with the institution’s increased bragging rights.
The Independent has Capecchi ‘The man who changed our world’ on their front cover. The Italian press has also been busy on the subject of Capecchi: La Stampa; Il Corriere (plus audio); La Repubblica (plus interview).
UPDATE – 10/10/07
I hang my head in shame for the UK. This is from the BBC: “A day after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, a talk on stem cell research by Sir Martin Evans has been cancelled because of a ‘lack of interest’.”