Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- University of Utah geneticist Mario Capecchi got an unexpected bonus after winning the Nobel Prize for medicine.
He learned he has a younger sister.
Capecchi, 70, and half-sister Marlene Bonelli, 69, met last month in northern Italy. It was technically a reunion, but really more of an introduction because they were too young to remember each other before being separated in the early days of World War II.
"She had been under the impression that our mother and myself had died in the war," Capecchi told The Salt Lake Tribune.
Capecchi's mother gave birth to Bonelli in 1939, when her son was just a toddler. Lucy Ramberg, a left-leaning American artist who was imprisoned for much of the war, handed over the baby girl to friends living in Austria, where she still lives.
Bonelli recognized Capecchi's name after he won the Nobel Prize last fall and informed the media in Austria that the famous scientist was her brother. The newspaper Dolomiten sent Capecchi photos of Bonelli.
"Looking at the pictures it was obviously my sister," Capecchi said, noting her resemblance to their mother.
The Dolomiten arranged for the reunion May 23 at a hotel in northern Italy, where the siblings hugged, shared photos and spoke through an interpreter.
"She doesn't speak English and I don't speak German and neither of us speaks Italian, although I can get away with it in a restaurant," Capecchi said.
The reunion was another dramatic turn in an already dramatic story. Capecchi, born in 1937, has fuzzy memories of being on his own during parts of the war, which ended as Capecchi was hospitalized for typhoid and malnutrition.
Capecchi and his mother reunited at the end of the war when Capecchi was 9 and emigrated to America, her mother's native country, and lived with her brother in Pennsylvania. Capecchi said his uncle told him his mother had been held in the Dachau concentration camp.
Records do not support that account and Capecchi is now uncertain of the details of his mother's plight, only that she was imprisoned and likely taken to Munich.
As a child in America, Capecchi started on what became a brilliant academic career.
It was capped off by winning the Nobel Prize, along with two Britons, for work that led to a powerful and widely used technique to manipulate genes in mice, and which advanced the understanding of a range of killer diseases.
It also led to the emotional reunion with the sister he couldn't remember.
Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune
(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
