A Nobel Gift: Scientist Reunites with His Long Lost Sister

Winning the Nobel Prize brought another unexpected windfall for Mario Capecchi. Last October, he won the Nobel prize for medicine. And with the publicity that followed his achievement, he was reunited with his long lost sister. A sister he never knew he had.

Capecchi, 70, and half-sister Marlene Bonelli, 69, finally met last month in northern Italy. They were too young to remember each other when they were separated in the early days of World War II. Marlene Bonelli was born in 1939 when Capechi was a one year’s old. His mother was the daughter of Impressionist painter Lucy Dodd Ramberg and German archaeologist Walter Ramberg. Because of the turmoil, his mother entrusted the infant to friends, Max Bonelli and Luise Linder, fearing that she would soon be arrested. Marlene grew up in Austria where she presently lives.

But fate wasn’t so kind to little Mario. He was separated from his mother at age 3 when the Gestapo arrested her as a political prisoner in 1941 and took her to a concentration camp near Munich (Dachau) for pamphleteering and belonging to an anti-Fascist group. His mother, an American-born poet, and his father, an Italian military officer, were not married. Initially, he spent some years with a peasant family, subsisting on the little money his mother had left him. Very soon that ran out. He survived by living off the street and in various orphanages and finally ended up in a hospital severely malnourished. His mother survived the concentration camp and she eventually managed to track him down. He was 9. His mother returned to America, where he grew up alongwith his uncle’s family in Pennsylvania oblivious to the existence of a sister.

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. With the Nobel Prize and the subsequent fame, Marlene Bonelli recognized her brother and informed the local media about her lost sibling. 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.

On May 23, brother and sister finally reunited after a lifetime. They hugged, shared photos and memories and spoke through an interpreter for Marlene couldn’t speak any English and Mario couldn’t speak a word of German and neither spoke any Italian.

His reunion with his sister was another dramatic turn in Mario Capecchi’s illustrious life. And it is certain he would enjoy this as much as he did the Nobel Prize.