"Gene targeting truly changed the course of medical research," U. President Michael K. Young said. "It has brought hope ... to millions of people worldwide."

The award is just one more example, Young said, of Capecchi's "life that reflects passion to do good in the world."

That passion to do good is perhaps more striking because Capecchi's childhood took place in a world that was far from sunny. He was born Oct. 6, 1937, in Verona, Italy, the son of an American-born, "quite remarkable" poet, Lucy Ramberg, and an Italian airman. His grandmother was American artist Lucy Dodd.

An instructor at the Sorbonne when World War II broke out, Ramberg was part of a group of artists called the Bohemians "who thought they could wipe out fascism and Nazism with a pen," Capecchi said. They wrote and distributed pamphlets, and Adolf Hitler's forces began sending them to concentration camps as political prisoners.

Before she was shipped to Dachau, Ramberg sold her belongings and gave the money to a friend so he could take care of Mario, then a toddler. When the money ran out a year later, the boy was turned loose, at age 4 1/2, to survive however he could.

"You take care of your own family first," Capecchi said without rancor, after humorously saying "everybody get out their hanky," when asked to recount the remarkable tale of his childhood.

When American soldiers liberated Dachau in 1945, Ramberg was one of the few survivors and spent more than a year searching for her son. She finally found him, desperately ill, in a hospital south of where they had lived. It was his ninth birthday. (She would later die on his 50th birthday.)

They returned a short time later to America, where he grew up on a Quaker commune co-founded by his uncle. Although they had their own house, they shared meals and labor and the value of education and hard work. There he learned English and began what was to be a lifelong love affair with learning.

Capecchi earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics from Antioch College — where students alternated semesters working and in the classroom — then earned his doctorate in biophysics from Harvard, where he completed his thesis work under his mentor, Nobel laureate James D. Watson, who with France Crick determined the structure of DNA.

Capecchi was an associate professor of biochemistry at Harvard when the U. wooed him to Utah in 1973 with the promise he could work on long-term projects and look for "big answers to big questions." Too many researchers, he said, are forced by the question "what's new" to tackle "little questions."