Mary-Claire King

Mary-Claire King (born February 27, 1946) is an American geneticist.

She was the first to show that breast cancer can be inherited due to mutations in the gene she called BRCA1.

She studies human genetics and is particularly interested in genetic heterogeneity and complex traits.

She studies the interaction of genetics and environmental influences and their effects on human conditions such as breast and ovarian cancer, inherited deafness, schizophrenia, HIV, systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis.

Mary-Claire King was born on February 27, 1946, to Harvey and Clarice King of Wilmette, Illinois, near Chicago.

Her father worked for Standard Oil of Indiana.

When King was 15 years old, her childhood best friend died of cancer.

King became interested in science in the hope of learning enough to prevent and treat such illnesses.

King received her undergraduate degree in mathematics (cum laude) from Carleton College, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1967.

King was accepted into the graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley, and soon became politically active.

She helped to organize protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1970.

She says: "The single most effective thing we did was on the day after the US invaded Cambodia, we got out our suit jackets and shirtwaist dresses – not clothes that any of us had worn since coming to Berkeley – and went to the synagogues and churches and by the end of Sunday we had 30,000 letters opposing the action."

She dropped out of university briefly after the National Guard was sent in against student protestors.

She spent a year doing consumer advocacy work for Ralph Nader, investigating pesticide use and its effects on farm workers.

After her return to Berkeley, advisor Allan Wilson persuaded her to switch from mathematics to genetics.

King had been introduced to genetics by professor Curt Stern, in the last class he taught before his retirement.

In her doctoral work at Berkeley, King demonstrated through comparative protein analysis that chimpanzees and humans were 99% genetically identical.

King's work supported Allan Wilson's view that chimpanzees and humans diverged only five million years ago, and King and Wilson suggested that gene regulation was likely responsible for the significant differences between the species.

King completed her thesis in 1972, and received her doctorate in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973.

Next King went to Santiago, Chile to teach at the Universidad de Chile as part of a University of California-University of Chile exchange program.

Her time there was cut short when the Chilean government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in a CIA-backed military coup on September 11, 1973.

King and her husband Robert Colwell returned to Berkeley in late December.

She later learned that a number of her colleagues and students had either disappeared or been killed.

King accepted a postdoctoral position at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), to work with Nicholas L. Petrakis.

King married ecologist Robert K. Colwell in 1973.

As of January 1, 1974, King began to work on the problem of why breast cancer tends to appear in families.

King's younger brother Paul King, a mathematician and business consultant, was the CEO of Vanalco in Vancouver, Washington.

From 1974 to 1990, King carried out years of painstaking research, seeking a genetic marker, an identifiable piece of genetic material, that tended to accompany the presence of breast cancer in families.

For much of that time, the predominant theory was that cancer was viral.

They have one child, Emily King Colwell, born in 1975.

Emily studied the evolution of languages at Brown University with a B.A. in linguistics.

King accepted a faculty appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, as professor of genetics and epidemiology in 1976.

King and Colwell divorced in 1983.

In 1984, in Argentina, she began working in identifying children who had been stolen from their families and adopted illegally under the military dictatorship during the Dirty War (1976–1983).

She has received many awards, including the Lasker Award and the National Medal of Science.

She has been the American Cancer Society Professor of the Department of Genome Sciences and of Medical Genetics in the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington since 1995.

Besides known for her accomplishment in identifying breast cancer genes, King is also known for demonstrating that humans and chimpanzees are 99% genetically identical and for applying genomic sequencing to identify victims of human rights abuses.

She remained at UC Berkeley until 1995, when she accepted an appointment as the American Cancer Society Professor at the University of Washington.

In 2002, Discover magazine recognized King as one of the 50 most important women in science.

She also served on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2015.