Dr. Mary-Claire King

formulated the idea of there being both activating mutations in oncogenes and the possibility of there being mutations that could be inherited in what became known as tumor suppressor genes.

You could, and that both certainly existed in the world, and that both could be present as a cause of lung cancer, but they could be globally both present.

causing cancers, even if for any one cancer, you might have one rather than the other.

Or you could have both.

But this was all still rather ethereal at the time we're talking about.

I mean, I was accustomed to thinking across both of these ways of thinking.

And I was very drawn to the work of what we now call an epidemiologist.

She was called a statistician at the time, Jane Lane Coypon,

who worked in the first part of the 20th century for the British Home Office.

And she was a public health person.

And she was very interested in

what we would now call familial clustering.

So she asked the question, are daughters of women who die of breast cancer more likely to die of breast cancer than daughters of women who've died of something else?

And the answer was emphatically, yes.

But almost uniquely in her work, Dr. Wayne Claypond did not posit any environmental exposure that might be responsible.

Bear in mind her

her brief is to sort out public health and environmental exposures.

So I looked at all this and I thought, well, if all else fails, maybe think about genetics.

And that the critical thing was to identify those families and then to try to trace first just epidemiologically what exactly had happened

to all of the women in those families in terms of their cancer histories.