That's not to say he has no ego, she adds. "He's not puffed up, but I'd say he's got a strong ego. He's proud and sure of what he wants to do in the future. He's not into status symbols, but I'd say that scientifically he's self-assured."

Bright start, rough road

Capecchi was born Oct. 6, 1937, in Verona, Italy, a country caught up in "fascism, Naziism and communism." His grandmother was American artist Lucy Dodd, who left Oregon for Florence in her late teens and later raised her three children on her own there when her husband was killed in World War I. Capecchi's mother, Lucy Ramberg, was a poet of rising note who'd studied at the Sorbonne, becoming a lecturer in literature and languages. She spoke many languages fluently. She joined a group of artists called the Bohemians, who openly opposed fascism and Naziism.

His father was an officer in the Italian air force.

Capecchi was a baby when Hitler's forces started shipping artists to concentration camps. His mother sold everything and took the money to an Italian family. Would they, she wondered, use the money to care for Mario if she was taken away?

Her plans proved wise; she was shipped to Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Capecchi spoke of those days in a lecture he made when he won the Kyoto prize, his words captured forever in a pristine white-cloth-covered book that he lends casually to a reporter he hardly knows. The family raised wheat for a living. When the money dwindled, they turned Mario out to run the streets with other homeless youths in the heart of the war.

He was 4 1/2 years old.

Capecchi doesn't shy away from speaking of those days, but his words are vague, leaving much to the imagination. As he sits in his small, book-lined office in the genetics building on campus, his soft voice becomes still softer, his smile fades for just a minute.

"I have vivid memories," he says. "Some horrible. But they are snapshots, not a continuum."

At some point, he was hospitalized, one of hundreds of children dying of malnutrition in a hospital that couldn't adequately feed or treat them.

His mother found him on his ninth birthday. He hadn't bathed in years. (She would die, a woman who never recovered mentally from the suffering she'd endured in Dachau, on his 50th birthday in 1987.)

The duo made the two-week-long boat journey to America. He remembers seeing the Statue of Liberty. Their destination was a Quaker commune near Philadelphia, which his uncle helped found and that flourishes still.

"It was a huge culture shock," he says. "I went from a completely nonsocial environment to one that was completely social — everyone knows everything."