Mary-Claire King to receive Public Welfare Medal

The National Academy of Sciences today announced that it is presenting its 2025 Public Welfare Medal to Mary-Claire King for her pioneering genetic research and its transformative application to human rights.

King is a professor of medicine, Division of Medical Genetics, and of genome sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.

The medal is the academy’s most prestigious award, established in 1914 and presented annually to honor extraordinary use of science for the public good. The Public Welfare Medal will be awarded on April 27 in Washington, D.C.  The award ceremony will take place at 11:30 a.m. PDT and will be webcast live. Register for the livestream.

King will be recognized for leveraging the power of genome sciences throughout her career to promote justice around the globe.

Her groundbreaking use of mitochondrial DNA reunited families who were victims of Argentina's Dirty War (1976-1983) and advanced forensic genetics worldwide. King played a pivotal role in reconnecting families after the military dictatorship abducted infants and placed them in the households of police, military and collaborators.

The grandmothers sought help from geneticists to identify their grandchildren whom they thought had been among the kidnap victims. The women became known as Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo. Because the children’s parents were also among the disappeared, determining the biological relationships between grandparents and children required new methods.

By developing a mathematical model, the Index of Grandpaternity, and sequencing mitochondrial DNA, King was able to establish relationships at a high level of certainty through maternal lineages alone. Because mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother and remains unchanged except by mutation across generations, King could compare the mitochondrial sequences of the children with those of potential maternal relatives.

For the first several years, all sequencing was by hand, one DNA base-pair at a time. King’s approach has led to the reunification of 138 families.

To place the approach on a rigorous legal and scientific footing, King worked with the grandmothers to establish the National Bank of Genetic Data in Argentina, the first institution dedicated to systematically preserving genetic information for future identifications. King extended her work to the identification of remains by matching DNA extracted from teeth to the DNA of maternally related survivors.

"Mary-Claire King’s groundbreaking contributions to genetics have not only advanced our scientific understanding but have also had a profound impact on human rights and social justice,” said Nancy Andrews, the National Academy of Sciences Home Secretary. “Her pioneering use of mitochondrial DNA to reunite families torn apart by violence and repression exemplifies the power of science to serve humanity.”

In other efforts, King worked with the U.S. armed forces’ Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii to help identify remains of soldiers listed as missing in action from the Vietnam War, Korean War and World War II.  

She has also assisted human rights organizations with genetic identifications on six continents after her colleagues from Argentina formed the United Nations Forensic Anthropology Team, which uses the same approach to enable DNA identifications worldwide.

Since 1997, King has co-led an Israeli-Palestinian-American collaboration to identify the genetic causes of Mendelian disorders in Middle Eastern families. She improved access for genetic testing for families throughout the region and fostered genetic training opportunities for Palestinian graduate students.

“Through her visionary application of genetics, Mary-Claire King has transformed the way science can be used to seek justice and reunite families,” said National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt. “Her work stands as a testament to the profound ways in which scientific discovery can address some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian challenges.”

In addition to her work in forensic genetics and human rights, King is known for her discovery in 1990 of the BRCA1 gene. Harmful mutations in this gene can significantly increase a woman's risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The discovery revolutionized the understanding of cancer genetics and led to advances in cancer prevention and treatment.

King also developed BROCA, an unpatented genomic screening panel that enables the simultaneous detection of mutations across multiple cancer-related genes and is now widely used in clinical laboratories.

More recently, King has made key advances in understanding schizophrenia. Her findings have provided evidence that the disorder often arises from de novo mutations — new genetic changes not present in the parents’ genomes. Her research observed that these mutations damaged genes regulating the development of brain cells and tissues in the fetal prefrontal cortex, which controls higher-order cognitive functions.  

By integrating genomics with neuroscience, King and colleagues helped uncover the molecular underpinnings of schizophrenia. Their research offered new insights into how schizophrenia develops and pointed to potential therapeutic targets.

For these contributions and more, King has received numerous honors, including the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science in 2014, the National Medal of Science in 2016, and the Canada Gairdner International Award in 2021.

King was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 1994 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution established by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership and, with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine, provides science, engineering and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

More information, including a list of past recipients of the Public Welfare Medal, is available here.
 

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