Mary-Claire King, the American Cancer Society Professor of Medical Genetics and Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, has been awarded the 2025 Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in honor of her pioneering genetic research and its transformative application to human rights. The medal, considered the academy’s most prestigious award, is presented annually to recognize extraordinary use of science for the public good.
Dr. King’s research on mitochondrial DNA has had a profound impact on families around the world. During the 1980s, she developed a mathematical model and used gene sequencing techniques to track maternal lineages of families torn apart by violence during Argentina’s Dirty War from 1976 to 1983. To date, her work has led to the identification and reunification of 138 families. She later worked with the U.S. Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii to identify the remains of soldiers listed as missing in action from the Vietnam War, Korean War, and World War II.
Throughout her career, Dr. King has helped several human rights organization with genetic identifications on six continents. Since 1997, she has co-led an Israeli-Palestinian-American collaboration to identify genetic causes of Mendelian disorders in Middle Eastern families.
In addition to her ground-breaking accomplishments in forensic genetics, Dr. King is known for discovering BRCA1 mutations, which can significantly increase a woman’s risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The discovery led to significant advances in cancer prevention and treatment, including Dr. King’s development of a non-patented genomic screening panel that is now widely used in clinical laboratories. More recently, she has leveraged her genomic expertise to advance the understanding of schizophrenia.
Dr. King has taught in the departments of medicine and genome sciences at the University of Washington for the past three decades. She currently serves as associate director of the medical scientist M.D./Ph.D. training program and holds an affiliation with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Earlier, she spent two decades on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. She previously served as president of the American Society of Human Genetics and is a founding member of the World Health Organization Science Council.
Dr. King earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Carleton College in Minnesota and her Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. Her scientific accomplishments have earned her honorary doctorates from 22 institutions worldwide.