Nobel medicine laureates welcome `marvelous honor`

"It's been a marvelous honor for the people working in the lab as well as the university," 70-year-old Mario Capecchi of the United States told AFP.

He shared the prize with compatriot Oliver Smithies, 82, and Britain's Martin Evans, 66, for their discoveries on how to genetically manipulate mouse embryonic stem cells, leading to laboratory rodents that replicate human disease. The three have never worked together, however.

Smithies told AFP that when he got an early morning call from Sweden, he was pretty sure of the result.

"It's actually a rather peaceful feeling of culmination of a life of science," he said from his home in North Carolina.