Geneticist Mary-Claire King, 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for Research

The American geneticist Mary-Claire King has been awarded the 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, as announced today by the jury in charge of the award.

The jury for this Award -convened by the Princess of Asturias Foundation- was presided by Pedro Miguel Echenique Landiríbar and composed of Jesús del Álamo, Alberto Aparici Benages, Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras, Avelino Corma Canós, Elena García Armada, Bernardo Hernández González, Rosa Menéndez López, Amador Menéndez Velázquez, Concepción Alicia Monje Micharet, Ginés Morata Pérez, Erika Pastrana Izquierdo, Noemí Pinilla Alonso, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Peregrina Quintela Estévez, María Teresa Telleria Jorge, María Vallet Regí and Manuel Toharia Cortés (secretary).

Mary Claire King

Mary Mary-Claire King (Chicago, USA, February 27, 1946) graduated cum laude in Mathematics from Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota) in 1966 and subsequently completed her doctoral dissertation in Genetics at UC Berkeley under the direction of Allan Wilson. From 1974 to 1976 she completed a postdoctoral stay at the University of San Francisco, after which she returned to Berkeley as Professor of Genetics and Epidemiology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, where she worked until 1995, when she joined the American Cancer Society at the University of Washington (Seattle) and is an affiliate member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (Seattle), positions she still holds today.

His doctoral work in Evolutionary Biology was already of enormous significance when he determined the great genetic proximity between humans and chimpanzees – 99% identical – through statistical analysis of protein similarity. In 1974, King began research in Dr. Petrakis’ group on the origin of breast cancer. After many years of complex research and development of new statistical models of population genetics and evolutionary genetics, in 1990 he managed to identify a gene located on chromosome 17, called BRCA1, and that mutations in this gene were involved in the development of certain types of breast and ovarian cancer. This work represented a paradigm shift in the knowledge of the origin of cancer, a complex disease that was not suspected to have a genetic origin, and in its treatment. From then on, the study of this disease and other so-called rare diseases, such as Huntington’s disease or cystic fibrosis, began to be approached from a different point of view.

Mary-Claire King has also played a very relevant role in the application of genetics in the field of human rights, such as in cases of identification of the disappeared and their descendants after the Argentine dictatorship and in other countries, with the so-called “grandparents’ index”. King – whose work has led to the identification and reunification of 138 families so far – worked with Argentine grandmothers of the disappeared to establish the National Genetic Data Bank in Argentina, the first institution dedicated to systematically preserving genetic information for future identification.

He has also recently made key contributions to the understanding of schizophrenia, providing evidence that the disorder arises from de novo mutations – changes in the DNA sequence of a gene that are observed for the first time in a person and have not appeared in previous generations – that damage genes regulating neurogenesis in the fetal prefrontal cortex. By integrating genomics with neuroscience, he and his colleagues have played a key role in finding the molecular underpinnings of schizophrenia and have provided new insights into its pathogenesis and potential therapies. According to Scopus, he has 349 scientific publications, 48,631 citations and an h-index of 106.

Mary-Claire King holds honorary doctorates from more than twenty universities around the world and is a member of, among others, the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. In 2012 she was president of the American Society of Human Genetics and has held and holds relevant positions in multiple public institutions and universities in the United States, such as the National Cancer Institute and other national health institutes, and at the international level, such as the WHO Scientific Council. Among the multiple awards he has received are the University of California Medal (2004), the Women and Science of the Weizmann Institute of Israel (2006), the Lasker- Koshland Medal for Medical Research (USA, 2014), the U.S. National Medal of Science (2016), the Shaw in Life Sciences and Medicine (Hong Kong, 2018), the Mendel Medal of the UK Genetics Society (2018), the Gairdner International Prize of Canada (2021), and the Public Welfare Medal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2025).

The Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research is granted for “work in the cultivation and improvement of research, discovery and/or invention in astronomy and astrophysics, medical sciences, technological sciences, Earth and space sciences, life sciences, physics, mathematics and chemistry, as well as the disciplines corresponding to each of these fields and the techniques related to them”.

Nomination

This candidacy was proposed by Peter Greenberg, 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, and is supported by Gene E. Robinson, Director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois (USA).

A total of 59 candidates of 23 nationalities competed for this year’s Scientific and Technical Research Award.

Princess of Asturias Awards presented in 2025

This was the seventh of the eight Princess of Asturias Awards to be presented this year, the forty-fifth edition. Previously, the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities went to the South Korean-born German philosopher and essayist Byung-Chul Han, the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature to the Spanish writer Eduardo Mendoza, the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences to the American sociologist and demographer Douglas Massey, and the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences to the American sociologist and demographer Douglas Massey, the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts to Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, the Princess of Asturias Award for Sports to American tennis player Serena Williams and the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord to the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico. The Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation will be presented next week.

The Princess of Asturias Awards ceremony will be held, as is traditional, in October in a solemn ceremony presided over by Their Majesties the King and Queen of Spain, accompanied by Their Royal Highnesses the Princess of Asturias and the Infanta Sofia.

Each Princess of Asturias Award is endowed with a sculpture by Joan Miró -a representative symbol of the award-, a diploma, an insignia and a cash prize of fifty thousand euros.