Dr. Mary-Claire King

And we were there during the Golpe del Estado, in which the military overthrew the government of President Allende.

President Allende died in the

in the attack on the Moneda, and everything was shut down.

So you wonder what does this have to do with my shifting to breast cancer from evolutionary biology, but it meant that our time in Chile was both fraught and very different than we had anticipated.

And it was an extremely important, informative time for me in terms of all the work I did later.

But it also opened to me the idea that one could apply genetics as a way of thinking to just about anything.

In practical terms, the convenio was shut down, and we left Chile on Christmas Day of 1973.

So I returned to Berkeley far earlier than I had anticipated without a job.

But, of course, incredibly discouraged, depressed.

I mean, it was very much at loose ends.

And I started looking for a job, and I heard through friends of friends that there was a position open over at UC San Francisco in the lab of a lovely, lovely oncologist named Nick Petrakis.

It was there because...

Nixon had fairly recently declared war on cancer.

And many of these sorts of entry-level or just post-PhD positions were being made available for people from other fields to study cancer biology.

So, I went to see Dr. Petrakis.

He knew about the work with chimpanzees, and he said, it will be quite a shift.

And I said, well, if you'll teach me about cancer, I'll teach you about evolutionary biology.

And I worked in his lab.

He was not an experimentalist.

He was a pediatric oncologist.