Pioneering geneticist Mary-Claire King receives the 2014 Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science.

The 2014 Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science has been awarded to Dr. Mary-Claire King, a pioneer in human genetics (Figure 1). Dr. King discovered the BRCA1 gene locus that underlies hereditary breast cancer; additionally, she has been instrumental in utilizing DNA sequencing to identify missing persons. In her address to the American Society for Human Genetics in 2012, Dr. King stated that “In genetics, there are hard problems and incredibly hard problems, but we do not acknowledge any unsolvable problems. The most daunting task for us is not tackling new discovery but rather integrating discovery into a meaningful social context” (1). Dr. King has consistently taken on incredibly hard problems in genetics, and her work has had a profound influence on our understanding of the genetics of human disease, on the use of DNA to advance human rights and prosecute abuses of those rights, and on our view of the frontiers in genomic technologies.