Dr. Mary-Claire King

When you and I spoke early on about this conversation, you said that one thing you were curious about was how does one pick a project and how does one stick with it?

And, of course, I was thinking about that a lot.

And I realized that one really important component is that you have friends who are engaged in it with you.

You absolutely need a posse.

You need friends.

You need people, right, who care about the project also.

How could you do what you do without your friends?

They really got your back.

And on days that are hopelessly discouraging, they're still there.

I think it's an and.

The scientific reason was the fact that of all of the different sorts of cancer that Dr. Lane Claypon had looked at and that really fine epidemiologists had been looking at in the intervening 60 years,

Breast cancer was the most striking in having very strong clustering in families, but without any obvious environmental exposure.

that was responsible.

There was no smoking.

There was no exposure to an occupational carcinogen.

But the familial question was very strong.

So that's a technical reason.

It didn't, of course, make the actual process any easier, but it gave one a real

underpinning for it being logical to think about.

And the other was not specifically personal to me.