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Italian-born Mario Capecchi, fellow US citizen Oliver Smithies and Briton Sir Martin Evans were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine late last night for ground-breaking discoveries that led to a technology known as gene targeting.
The process has helped scientists to develop models on mice of human disorders from cardiovascular and neuro-degenerative ailments, diabetes and cancer.
The researchers used so-called "knockout mice" - animals whose genetic code has been altered in the lab to either turn on or off certain genes that mice and humans share.
