Dr. Mary-Claire King

And then to use the tools of genetics that existed at the time, which were increasingly the capacity to try to locate genes on chromosomes.

A chromosome is a physical reality.

A gene is a physical reality.

Every gene has an address on a chromosome or in mitochondrial DNA.

If one can find that address, even if one doesn't know the sequence of the gene, a situation that now would not obtain because we would know the sequence immediately, but in those days, of course, we didn't, one will have shown that that gene has to exist.

So what my contribution was in all of this was that realization, that you could use what was then called linkage analysis in families and chromosome mapping

as an epistemological tool to prove the existence of the physical reality of a gene, even though the Genome Project was more than a decade away.

I think intuition is extremely important, extremely important.

And I worry now that we aren't...

encouraging intuition enough in our students and even in our postdocs.

I think clearly there are tremendous advantages to team science, but I think one of the disadvantages to team science is that everyone has a small part of a huge problem

And the opportunities to indulge your intuition are far fewer in that context.

Exactly.

You got it.

Yeah.

Tell me more.

Well...

Again, you need to bear in mind the social context.

Always.

How many young women with PhDs in genetics were trying to solve breast cancer or anything like it?