The National Academy of Sciences today announced that it will present Mary-Claire King, PhD, with its 2025 Public Welfare Medal 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 UW School of Medicine.
The medal is the academy’s most prestigious award. Established in 1914, it is presented annually to honor the extraordinary use of science for the public good.
Genetic research and human rights
King will be recognized for leveraging the power of genome sciences throughout her career to promote justice around the globe. The Academy notes these of her many accomplishments:
- Her groundbreaking use of mitochondrial DNA testing reunited families who were victims of Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983) and advanced forensic genetics worldwide.
- King’s work 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.
- Her efforts in assisting 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.
- King’s development of 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.
- And, more recently, King’s key advancements in understanding schizophrenia.
To learn more about the impact of her work, read the full story on the UW Medicine Newsroom.
Register for the award livestream
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.
Editor’s Note: Originally published on the UW Medicine Newsroom.
