Dr. Mary-Claire King

I think there are two

On the one hand, it's to satisfy intellectual curiosity.

And that transcends all forms of science from astronomy through molecular biology, archaeology through botany, everything.

And then in parallel with that, and obviously knit together with it, is to be useful.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

It's a very good question.

I think each of us has to be our whole selves.

And part of my whole self is that when I see a problem of any sort, I want to solve it.

And many of those problems are not in the narrow sense scientific problems, although

Obviously, in this case, it came to be.

But many are political problems.

I was, of course, a young adult in Berkeley in the 60s.

Unavoidably political.

Unavoidably.

And that was a very important political education.

And it was a political education that we learned from each other.

but we also learned from our mentors who had been variously Holocaust survivors or survivors of the American McCarthy era.

None of these things happen in a vacuum.

So what I learned from them, I enacted myself, of course, in very different contexts, and I hope I have conveyed to the people of the next generation who work with me.