Dr. Mary-Claire King was recently on the Indiana University campus to receive the Hermann J. Muller award, and to give this year’s Muller Lecture on genetics and genomics. While she was there, she joined host Aaron Cain in the WFIU studios.

King is a professor at the University of Washington, where she studies genetics and its influence on human conditions such as breast and ovarian cancer, schizophrenia, HIV, and lupus....King’s thesis work led to a game-changing Science cover article in 1975, reporting that humans and chimpanzees are 99% genetically identical.She later found that a single gene (BRCA1) was responsible for many breast and ovarian cancers. This discovery revolutionized the study of all sorts of human diseases.

Her work in genetics has even helped identify victims of human rights abuses, like Argentinian children who had been stolen from their families and adopted illegally under the military dictatorship that ended there in 1983.