Talk:Mary-Claire King

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 January 2019 and 30 April 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Amsmiley16.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 03:33, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

fact and fiction -- Decoding Annie Parker
This article needs a section about the UPCOMING RELEASE of this semi-biographical movie on Dr. King's work. Particularly this article needs to differentiate between real-world facts and any fiction the movie may introduce into her life history (ex: The theatrical promo for this movie use the phrase "the almost discovery of a cure for cancer". Did King "almost find" such a cure?).

One might argue that such clarification is the responsibility of the article on the movie however anyone seriously researching the good doctor will not go there first but rather here. The movie article is about fiction. This article is about facts and as such should include debunking of false data. 207.233.90.1 (talk) 21:38, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

BRCA1 and BRCA2 credit
So, an editor (User:Bbbogden) just put in these cited lines (diff), which I removed:


 * King was not on the team that discovered BRCA1. There is an inaccurate statement in Time magazine calling King "the woman who discovered BRCA cancer gene".  King was not on the team that discovered BRCA2.

The difficulty is that the references do not actually support the statements without an intermediate conclusion, and that is not supported here. The first cite about BRCA1 cites to a 1994 Science paper without King; however, King's earlier work identified that a gene was in operation. So this becomes one of those questions that's harder to say: Who "discovered" something, when the "discovery" was multiple steps? The same point applies to the BRCA2 sentence, which cites to a 1995 Nature paper. The reference to Time magazine is unfortunately "original research", since it claims that the Time magazine article was in error. (See WP:NOR for more info about the "no original research" policy.) That description of "error" is itself the factual assertion that needs to be supported here.

I'm pinging the editor who made these good faith changes,. The problem here is that in each instance, the assertion you're making is an assertion about discoveries and the significance of them. Those assertions are the sorts of facts / conclusions which need to be supported. The cites you've included in good faith are cites to the underlying documents (the Science & Nature papers, & the Time article) but you're making assertions about those documents. (Specifically: That the Science & Nature papers are the ones to credit with the "discovery" of BRCA1/2; and that Time is wrong.) I hope this distinction is clear. What you need at this point is an article about BRCA1/2 that explains the discovery and attribution history, and then we can cite it to make clear what King's relationship to these discoveries is. --Lquilter (talk) 18:54, 22 April 2015 (UTC)


 * A bit more on the substance: My understanding is that in the 1980s King identified, statistically, the existence of a gene or gene complex linked to breast cancer; then in 1990 she identified the gene markers on the chromosome. Myriad & King were then both working on cloning out the specific genes themselves, which happened in the mid-1990s (the 1994 and 1995 papers). The PNAS 2014 profile of Mary-Claire King lays out this history. (http://www.pnas.org/content/111/50/17690.full.pdf+html).  We have to be careful here on Wikipedia to accurately describe the history in terms that laypeople can understand; and given the high-profile nature of the work, and its commercialization, we want to be scrupulously accurate and non-contentious.  So I would strongly suggest that we confine editing on the "discovery" of BRCA1/2 to this page until we have consensus. Cheers, --Lquilter (talk) 19:07, 22 April 2015 (UTC)