Two American scientists and a Briton won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.

The widely used process has helped scientists use mice to study heart disease, diabetes, cancer, cystic fibrosis and other diseases.

The prize is shared by Mario R Capecchi, 70, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies, 82, a native of Britain now at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Sir Martin J Evans, 66, of Cardiff University in Wales.

The Nobel is a particularly striking achievement for Capecchi. A native of Italy, he was separated from his mother at age 4 when she was taken to the Dachau concentration camp as a political prisoner during World War II.

For four years, Capecchi lived on the street or in orphanages, “and most of the time hungry,” he recalled in a University of Utah publication in 1997. Malnutrition sent him to a hospital where his mother found him on his ninth birthday. Within two weeks they left for the United States, where he went to school for the first time, starting in third grade despite not knowing English.

In a telephone interview from Salt Lake City, Capecchi called the award “a fantastic surprise.”

The three scientists were honoured for a technique called gene targetting, which lets scientists inactivate or modify particular genes in mice. That in turn lets them study how those genes affect health and disease.

“Gene targeting has pervaded all fields of biomedicine. Its impact on the understanding of gene function and its benefits to mankind will continue to increase over many years to come,” said the citation for the $1.54 million prize.

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