NAS Public Welfare Medal

The NAS Public Welfare Medal is the Academy’s most prestigious award and is presented annually to honor extraordinary use of science for the public good.

The Academy will present its 2025 Public Welfare Medal to Mary-Claire King for her pioneering genetic research and its transformative application to human rights. Her groundbreaking use of mitochondrial DNA reunited families who were victims of Argentina’s “Dirty War” during the 1970s and 1980s, advanced forensic genetics worldwide, and illustrated the power of science in promoting justice and public welfare. 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.

King played a pivotal role in reuniting families torn apart during Argentina’s Dirty War (1976–1983), when the military dictatorship abducted infants from their families, placing them in the households of police, military, and collaborators. The disappeared children’s grandmothers, who became known as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, sought help from geneticists to identify children who they suspected to be among the kidnap victims. In 1983, the grandmothers asked King for help.

With the children’s parents also among the disappeared, determining the biological relationships between grandparents and the missing children required new methods to establish kinship. Developing first a mathematical model — the Index of Grandpaternity — then sequencing mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), King was able to establish relationships at a high level of certainty through maternal lineages alone. Because mtDNA is inherited exclusively from the mother and remains unchanged except by mutation across generations, King was able to compare the mtDNA 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 identification and reunification of 138 families so far.

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, based on matching DNA extracted from teeth to DNA of maternally related survivors. Working with the U.S. armed forces’ Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, King identified remains of soldiers listed as MIA from the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and WWII. She has also assisted human rights organizations with genetic identifications on six continents, as her young colleagues from Argentina formed the United Nations Forensic Anthropology Team, which now carries out DNA identifications worldwide using this approach.

“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 National Academy of Sciences Home Secretary Nancy Andrews. “Her pioneering use of mitochondrial DNA to reunite families torn apart by violence and repression exemplifies the power of science to serve humanity.”

“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 BRCA1, mutations in which significantly increase a woman’s risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. The discovery revolutionized our understanding of cancer genetics and led to advances in cancer prevention and treatment. She also developed BROCA, a non-patented genomic screening panel that enables the simultaneous detection of mutations across multiple cancer-related genes and is now widely used in clinical laboratories.

King’s impact on genetics began as a graduate student in the 1970s in the laboratory of Allan Wilson at UC Berkeley, with demonstration that humans and chimpanzees are 99% identical in their coding sequences of genes, laying the foundation for modern studies on genetic regulation in human and primate evolution.

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

Most recently, King has made key contributions to understanding schizophrenia, providing crucial evidence that the disorder often arises from de novo mutations that damage genes regulating neurogenesis in the fetal prefrontal cortex. By integrating genomics with neuroscience, she and her colleagues helped uncover the molecular underpinnings of schizophrenia, offering new insights into its pathogenesis and potential therapeutic targets.

For these contributions and more, King has received numerous awards and honors, including the Lasker–Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science (2014), the National Medal of Science (2016), and the Canada Gairdner International Award (2021). King was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 1994 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.

King was a faculty member at UC Berkeley from 1975 to 1995 and since 1995 has been the American Cancer Society Professor in the departments of medicine and genome sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. King has also served in leadership roles in major scientific institutions, including as president of the American Society of Human Genetics and a founding member of the WHO Science Council. She has been a governing council member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and for multiple study sections and councils of the National Institutes of Health. She has received honorary doctorates from 22 universities and research institutions worldwide.

The Public Welfare Medal will be presented to King on April 27 during the Academy’s 162nd annual meeting.  Register for the ceremony’s livestream here.