A trailblazing geneticist reflects on her life and work
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, I'm Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today, it's common knowledge that many diseases and conditions have some kind of genetic link. But that wasn't always the case.
What is the significance of the BRCA1 gene discovery?
Long before the Human Genome Project tied so many health issues to differences in genetics, way back in 1990, researchers identified a gene called BRCA1. This was the first gene linked to a hereditary form of any common cancer. People with a mutation of BRCA1 stood a higher risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer than those without the mutation. Dr. Mary Claire King is a geneticist at the University of Washington. She and her lab were the first to identify that gene back in 1990. That discovery changed the way we thought about the inheritance of certain cancers. But that's not her only claim to fame. She used genetics to reunite children who were born in captivity or kidnapped by the Argentinian military dictatorship with their families.
Her Ph.D. work upended conventional wisdom about our evolutionary origins. Her research has changed the game again and again. Last September, I got the chance to sit down with Mary Claire King to find out about how she thinks about her work, what propels her, and what we can learn from her remarkable life in the lab. She joined us from KUOW in Seattle. Mary Claire, thank you for being here and welcome back to Science Friday.
Thank you very much, Flora.
Thank you. Let's go back to your salad days. I read your interest in problem solving began with Cubs games.
When I was about six, my dad was already disabled. He was retired early with what was a very serious form of Parkinson's and was home. And already, even in the early 50s, one could have on black and white TV... You know, baseball games every day. So we would watch together the Cubs games. And my favorite player was, of course, Ernie Banks. And my dad would make up story problems about Ernie Banks. So my favorite one that I have, of course, remembered all these years goes like this. Ernie Banks is coming up to bat. He's been batting .277. He'll probably have three at-bats this game. What's it going to take for his average to go up to .280?
And I was six. You're six, yeah. Most kids at six are like working on counting.
There we go. There we go. So I looked at my dad. The first time I heard this story problem, I looked at my dad and I said, I don't know. And he said, you're right. You can't know with that information. What more do you need to know? And of course, I didn't know that either. But he helped me work out that what more you need to know is how many times Ernie's already been up to bat. So when you add three to it, what's it going to do? And I was so taken with that logical way of thinking, and of course this was one incident out of hundreds and hundreds, and it went on from the time I was six until I was an adult, that I just never lost the flavor for it. It's what I find most intriguing about it. about science in general.
And I hope Ernie Banks is listening from heaven. Ernie, it's you. The idea that you can take a very complex phenomenon, and if you think about it a while, you can state it in terms that you can then solve. And it's formulating that notion, stating a hypothesis, is to me what's absolutely critical about all these different types of work.
It's the problem solving. It's the puzzle.
It's the puzzle. And of course, genetics is the absolute soul of puzzle solving. I apologize to all biochemists, but genetics is absolutely the basis of formulating hypotheses and then being able to test them both experimentally and quantitatively. So it has both of those sources of knowledge as appeals.
Okay. Fast forward. You major in math in college. You go on to do applied math in graduate school. You change over to genetics. I read that during your PhD, you were on the brink of leaving.
Oh, yeah. Well, this was the 60s in Berkeley. And you can only imagine. There were a number of... Incredible forces converging. Personally, I couldn't get any experiments to work. And I was in an experimental lab, a very fine experimental lab, but it was such a fine experimental lab.
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