[ed. How many have heard of Ms. King and her accomplishments? Not a lot, I'd imagine; and not me until recently. I wish we had a rock star category for scientists. See also, her fight against gene patenting.]
King began her career with a degree in mathematics (cum laude) from Carleton College. She completed her doctorate in 1973 at the University of California, Berkeley in genetics, after her advisor Allan Wilson persuaded her to switch from mathematics to genetics. In her doctoral work at Berkeley (1973), she demonstrated through comparative protein analysis that chimpanzees and humans are 99% genetically identical, a finding that stunned the public at the time, revolutionized evolutionary biology, and is today common knowledge. King's work supported Allan Wilson's view that chimpanzees and humans diverged only five million years ago, and King and Wilson suggested that gene regulation was likely responsible for the significant differences between the species, a prescient suggestion since borne out by other researchers.
King completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) before accepting a faculty appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, as professor of genetics and epidemiology (1976–1995).
While on the faculty at Berkeley, King demonstrated in 1990 that a single gene on chromosome 17, later known as BRCA1, was responsible for many breast and ovarian cancers—as many as 5-10% of all cases of breast cancer may be hereditary. The discovery of the "breast cancer gene" revolutionized the study of numerous other common diseases; prior to and during King's 16 years working on this project, most scientists had disregarded her ideas on the interplay of genetics with complex human disease. Genetics had been used in diseases with a single genetic tie, such as Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, and sickle-cell anemia, but researchers were skeptical about genetics' utility in the more common kinds of diseases that included multiple genetic factors and environmental factors as well.
The technique King developed to identify BRCA1 has since proven valuable in the study of many other illnesses, and King has built on to that research by identifying BRCA2, and extending her technique to other diseases and conditions.
Since 1990 King has also begun working in collaboration with scientists around the world to identify genetic causes of hearing loss and deafness. They successfully cloned the first nonsyndromic deafness-related gene in 1997. King continues to work with scientists Karen Avraham in Israel and Moien Kanaan in the West Bank, modeling international scientific cooperation in conjunction with conducting scientific research. Hereditary deafness is common amongst Arab communities, providing good study populations to understand the genetics.
King has also worked on the Human Genome Diversity Project, which seeks to delineate the distinctions between individuals in order to further understanding of human evolution and historical migrations.
At the request of Dr. William Maples, King was also involved in DNA investigations of the first party of Romanov remains exhumed in 1991 in Ekaterinburg, Russia.
King remained at Berkeley until 1995, when she took an appointment as the American Cancer Society Research Professor at the University of Washington.
King first applied her genetics skills to human rights work in 1984, when she and her lab began working with Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo) in Argentina to use dental genetics to identify missing persons, ultimately identifying and returning to their homes more than 50 children. The missing persons included at least 59 children, most born to women targeted and "disappeared" by the Argentine military dictatorship during the eight-year "dirty war" of the 1970s and 1980s. These children, after being removed from their imprisoned mothers, were often illegally "adopted" by military families without their mothers' consent. Las Abuelas ("the grandmothers") had gathered data trying to identify the children, and every Thursday, marched to the central plaza in Buenos Aires ("Plaza de Mayo") to demand the return of their grandchildren. The Argentinian government would not return the children without "proof" of kinship, however, and King's technique, using mitochondrial DNA and human leukocyte antigen serotyping genetic markers from dental samples, proved invaluable. The Supreme Court of Argentina in 1984 determined that King's test had positively identified the relationship of Paula Logares to her family, establishing the precedent for the ultimate reunification of dozens of families with their stolen children.
