Now it's personal

摘要

When her two sisters died from an aggressive form of breast cancer, Gail Walters was anxious not to meet the same fate. She scheduled surgery to have both of her breasts removed. Walters (not her real name) had been identified as being in a "BRCA2 family". In other words, she was likely to carry a mutation of the BRCA2 gene that would make her susceptible to breast cancer. rnAs luck would have it, a few weeks before her mastectomy, Mike Stratton at the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, Surrey, managed to sequence BRCA2. This meant that Walters could be screened - and quickly - for specific variants of the gene. Although both her sisters had the harmful variant, Walters did not, so her risk of developing breast cancer was no higher than average and the surgery was cancelled.