Dr. Mary-Claire King

With the exception of some really fabulous mid-level program officers at NCI, without whom I couldn't possibly have done this, nobody was paying any attention to me at all.

So I wrote a grant saying all the things I've just said to you, and I got this $35,000 grant.

And no one cared.

Who is she again?

It was a very different world.

Well, of course, I think it was a good thing in retrospect.

It didn't feel like a good thing at the time because you feel very, very isolated.

Yeah.

Because it took 17 years to do that mapping experiment.

It took 17 years to go from the idea through the necessary statistical proofs with population-based series of families of all sorts, that is not all severely affected families, and then to working with very severely affected families.

And building the map as we went along, which many people were contributing to because many people were trying to do this for various kinds of usually more explicitly genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease.

And so everyone who was making a map that enabled one to identify chromosomal locals was sharing data on the map bits.

Where are the markers, the signposts?

that helped you do this analysis.

And I was one of many, many people, hundreds of people, contributing to that.

But I think many of these folks were working in relatively individual obscurity and isolation.

I think those who were more prominent had a tougher time because people were looking over their shoulders.

But nobody looked over my shoulder on this project between 1974 and 1994.

Yeah.

But I had friends.