On Sept. 8, 2014, the University of Washington and UW Medicine announced that Mary-Claire King, UW professor of medicine, Division of Medical Genetics and of genome sciences, received the 2014 Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science.

The foundation honored King for “bold, imaginative and diverse contributions to medical science and human rights. … Her work has touched families around the world.”

The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation award is one of the most prestigious scientific prizes. The Special Achievement Award recognizes exceptional leadership and citizenship in biomedical science.

King is a world leader in cancer genetics and in the application of genetics to resolution of human rights abuses. She was the first to demonstrate that a genetic predisposition for breast cancer exists, as the result of inherited mutations in the gene she named BRCA1. More recently she has devised with Tom Walsh, UW associate professor of medical genetics, a scheme to screen for all genes that predispose to breast and ovarian cancers.

She has applied her genetics expertise to aid victims of human rights violations around the world. Beginning in the 1980s, King helped to find children in Argentina taken from their families during the military regime of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She developed an approach based on mitochondrial DNA sequencing that led to the reunion of more than 100 children with their families.