This is Marie-Claire King (born 1946), and just reading about her accomplishments makes me tired. Besides earning her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, she has six other honorary doctorates in science from the most prestigious universities in the world. From her work in discovering the genetic foundations of breast cancer, schizophrenia, and hearing loss, to her humanitarian work in using dental genetics to identify victims of political violence, King has made an enormous impression in the history of genetic studies.
Among her most important work were genetic studies she did early on in her career at Berkeley. Her academic advisor, Allan Wilson, supervised her laboratory projects comparing human and chimpanzee genomes. She measuresd out the DNA of both species and found that we share 99% of our genes with this fellow primate. In fact, humans don’t have all that many genes — around 20,000, the same number as many flies and worms. Rice and soy plants have almost twice as many genes as we do.
But obviously we are different and more complex than flies and plants (right?). What King and her advisor Wilson eventually concluded was that our genes only tell part of our story — our physical appearance depends every bit as much upon the “junk” DNA that regulates our gene expression . . . So that chimps and humans — and flies and humans, for that matter, turn out so differently. While our genes give a template instructing the proteins to activate in the body, other DNA acts as switches to either turn on or off our genes. So that we can learn math, or figure out which type of coffee bean we want in the morning.
King’s illustrious career in genetics is inspiring, and her insights into the way that our DNA operates has given us a new window to understanding human evolution.
Source(s): Neil Shubin, _Some Assembly Required_, 2020, Palgrave, pages 71-76. _From the Grapevine_, “5 Reasons We’re Glad Marie-Claire King Is on the Earth,” Jaime Graze, Feb 8, 2018. Image courtesy if Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.
