Mary-Claire King, American Cancer Society Research Professor at the University of Washington, delivered the spring Charter Lecture. She described her work in Argentina identifying the children of “the disappeared,” those who had been kidnapped and murdered by the totalitarian regime of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Some excerpts:
On the situation in Argentina which led to her involvement: “There was evidence, mostly anecdotal, of children being treated as biological children in situations where that was unlikely. The parents of the disappeared . . . thought that these children were their grandchildren. . . . The question was: Can we find genes that are specific enough that we can . . . identify that child? . . .”
Using first blood groups and later mitochondrial DNA, they have now resolved 63 cases. On the use of this technology for such purposes: “No one questions any more that DNA analysis can tell us who a person is. . . . But the psychological issues and the social issues are enormous, and the political issues can be as well. . . . These issues are an enormous challenge--the rights of a child to know their identity, the rights of a society to know its history, the need for that to be an autonomous decision on the part of the society and not imposed by others. . . . To me the point really is the enormous importance of people who are in this field explaining what the power of the technology is for good. Technology is technology--it is inherently neither good nor bad, it depends on what we choose to do with it, and that is a social decision. . . .”
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