The one-two research punch that allowed the creation of designer mice has earned the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Mario Capecchi, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Oliver Smithies of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Martin Evans of Cardiff University, U.K., will share the prize for developing the techniques to make knockout mice, animals that lack a specific gene or genes. Such mice have allowed scientists to learn the roles of thousands of mammalian genes and provided laboratory models of human afflictions in which to test potential therapies.
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