Hey, I'm Flor Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the podcast, this scientist changed how we think about hereditary cancer.

Coming up, a conversation with genetics pioneer Mary Claire King about her career and approach to science.

It really led me to believe that once your evidence is good, you really have to be very

loyal to your own evidence. You really do. You have to be very, very critical of it, but once

you're convinced you've got it, you can't cave.

Today, it's common knowledge that many diseases and conditions have some kind of genetic link.

But that wasn't always the case.

Long before the Human Genome Project tied so many health issues to differences in genetics, way back in 1990,

researchers identified a gene called BRCA-1.

This was the first gene linked to a hereditary form of any common cancer.

People with a mutation of BRCA-1 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. So today we are sitting

down with Mary Claire King to find out how she thinks about her work, what propels her, and what we

can learn from her remarkable life in the lab. She joins us from KUOWW in Seattle.

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