For nearly four decades, Prof. King has served as a faculty member in the Department of Biology at MIT. His work on protein folding and, importantly, misfolding as they relate to human disease and virus assembly has garnered numerous awards and honors: He was a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow, Jane Coffin Childs Fund Fellow, AAAS Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Merit Award. Additionally, Prof. King has taken critical roles at the intersection of science and public policy, including a tenure as President of the Biophysical Society in 1999. In 2003, he received the MIT Martin Luther King Leadership Award, which recognizes individuals who “embody the spirit of Dr. King’s work” [1] in their contributions to the MIT community. Prof. King’s recent efforts have focused on championing federal support for biomedical research as well as criticizing unrestrained defense spending. In part I of this interview, we examine the connections between science, activism, and policy through the lens of Prof. King’s diverse experiences as an academic and activist.

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In his many years of advocacy efforts from within academia, Professor King has centered the issue of nuclear weapons disarmament. His numerous initiatives within this realm emphasize that disarmament is fundamentally a question of funding, making clear that a society that prioritizes the funding of warfare does so at the cost of failing to fortify public health and healthcare. Dr. King currently chairs the Nuclear Disarmament Working Group of Mass Peace Action (MPA), a nonprofit that works to generate political momentum toward “a more just and peaceful U.S. foreign policy” [1]. At MPA, he has also helped to organize the Healthcare not Warfare campaign, which calls for the prioritization of tax dollars toward healthcare, housing, public transport, food security, and education through major cuts to the annual federal military budget. His career-long critique of the military-industrial complex stems from his days participating in Science for the People, an organization that emerged from the antiwar culture of the late 1960s to push the scientific establishment to approach science as a social endeavor by using scientific discoveries for the advancement of social causes rather than profit-making and warfare. His advocacy work critically examines the links between funding, public policy, and the types of societies that we build. In part II, we explore these issues with Professor King to gain his perspective on the relationship that funding (of higher education, lobbying, research) has with the social and scientific institutions that we configure.

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