Research Lecture at NOBEL FORUM
14 April, kl. 16.30
Free admission
Mary-Claire King, PhD, American Cancer Society Professor
Departments of Medicine and Genome Sciences
University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Title: “GENETIC ANALYSIS OF INHERITED BREAST AND OVARIANCANCER: FROM GENE DISCOVERY TO PUBLIC HEALTH”
“We are extraordinarily fortunate to be living in this era of exciting discoveries and rapid scientific advancements in human genetics. There has not been a more exciting time to be involved in the genetics field since Gregor Mendel counted smooth and wrinkled peas and Charles Darwin tended finches.”
Mary-Claire King, PhD
Abstract
That some families are particularly severely affected by breast cancer has been known since the time of the ancient Greek physicians and systematically documented first by the work of Paul Broca in the 19th century and then Jane Lane-Claypon in the early 20th century. The realization that this problem could be conceptualized in terms of formal human genetics and addressed by a combination of mathematical and experimental tools led to our demonstration in 1990 that breast cancer in some severely affected families was due to severe mutations in a then-still-hypothetical gene BRCA1 on human chromosome 17q. The cloning and functional characterization of BRCA1 and subsequently of BRCA2 and other sister genes has led, over the past 20 years, to widespread genetic testing for inherited predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer, to preventive interventions for women with mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2, and to development of effective treatments based on genotypes of patients and their tumors.