Mario Capecchi Discovers His Jewish Roots

Mario, a professor at Harvard, found out his mother was Lucy Ramberg, an American-born citizen.  Somehow she wound up in the German concentration camp. During World War II, his mother was sent to the Dachau concentration camp as punishment for pamphleteering and belonging to an anti-Fascist group. 

 

Nazis Wanted Lucy Ramberg

Nazis weren't sure where she came from. Some records say she was arrested in Italy, but she may have been arrested in New York, and put on a submarine.

Mario Becomes A Street Orphan

At first the young Jewish boy lived with a peasant family near Bolzano, but the family turned him out on the streets. At four-and-a-half years old he was left to fend for himself on the streets of northern Italy for the next four years, living in various orphanages and roving through towns with groups of other homeless children.

He almost died of malnutrition. His mother, meanwhile, had been freed from Dachau and began a year-long search for him. She finally found him in a hospital bed in Reggio Emilia, ill with a fever and subsisting on a daily bowl of chicory coffee and bread crust. She took him to Rome, where he had his first bath in six years.

Mario's Rich Uncle To The Rescue

In 1946 his uncle, Edward Ramberg, an American physicist at RCA, sent his mother money to return to the United States. 

Mario Attends This School

He graduated from George School, a Quaker boarding school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1956.

 

He Attends Harvard

In 1961 he attends Harvard to join the lab of James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.Capecchi received his Ph.D. in biophysics in 1967 from Harvard University, with his doctoral thesis completed under the tutelage of Watson.

Capecchi was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University from 1967 to 1969. In 1969 he became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Harvard Medical School. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1971.