For the soaring ability of five men--three who developed arguably the most useful tool for studying human disease; one who launched a new era of infertility treatment; and another whose diligence stamped out smallpox and changed the face of public health policy--each received a $50,000 honorarium and an inscribed statue of Nike, the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
"If [a cell] had that machinery," Capecchi tells The Scientist, "maybe we could fool it. If we gave it a piece of DNA, maybe we could fool it into thinking that's something it wanted to play with and exchange information with the crossover copy. Ten years later that [idea] worked." Numerous attempts at inserting a neomycin resistance sequence to disrupt the gene HPRT (which codes for hypoxanthine phosphoryibosyltrasferase) in a viable mouse finally resulted in success in 1987.1 With time Capecchi's lab developed a positive/negative selection process that greatly improved efficiency. He credits ...
