Mary-Claire King
| Mary-Claire King | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
February 27, 1946 Illinois, United States |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Biologist |
| Institutions | University of Washington, University of California, Berkeley |
| Alma mater |
Carleton College University of California, Berkeley University of California, San Francisco |
| Doctoral advisor | Allan Wilson |
| Known for | Genetics, Human rights |
| Notable awards | Heineken Prize Gruber Prize in Genetics (2004) Weizmann Award (2006) Pearl Meister Greengard Prize (2010) Lasker Award (2014) |
Mary-Claire King (born February 27, 1946) is an American human geneticist. She is a professor at the University of Washington, where she studies the genetics and interaction of genetics and environmental influences on human conditions such as HIV, lupus, inherited deafness, and also breast and ovarian cancer. King is known for three major accomplishments: identifying breast cancer genes; demonstrating that humans and chimpanzees are 99% genetically identical; and applying genomic sequencing to identify victims of human rights abuses. In 1984, in Argentina, she began working with Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo) in identifying children who had been stolen from their families and adopted illegally under the military dictatorship during the Dirty War (1976-1983).
King received her undergraduate degree in mathematics (cum laude) from Carleton College. She completed her doctorate in 1973 at the University of California, Berkeley in genetics, after her advisor Allan Wilson persuaded her to switch from mathematics to genetics. In her doctoral work at Berkeley (1973), she demonstrated through comparative protein analysis that chimpanzees and humans are 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 postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
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