Dr. Mary-Claire King

But he introduced me to all his friends.

And it was very clear right away that two things.

First, that breast cancer...

was causally, at the fundamental level, complex.

The prevailing theory at the time, and it was being proven for multiple cancers, was that cancers were caused by oncoviruses that became renamed oncogenes.

There was not...

yet known any sort of oncogenic story for breast cancer, but there was very clear familial clustering of breast cancer that had been noticed all the way back to the times of the ancient Greeks, which, of course, Dr. Petrakos, being of Greek ancestry, was quick to tell me.

All of the above.

I think there was... If you cast your mind back to that period...

People thinking about genetics at the level of inherited genetics, not mutations in cancers, but at the level of inherited genetics, and people thinking about the epidemiology of cancer came from two very different worlds.

So you have to cast your mind even farther back to the beginning of the 20th century and the horrors of the eugenics movement.

The eugenics movement, of course, grew out of early thinking about inherited genetics.

Not Mendel's thinking, but some of the other ways of thinking about inherited genetics.

Meanwhile, in parallel, progressive people who were

oriented toward the public health, were thinking about epidemiology.

So those two strains, even after the end of the eugenics movement, those two strains were still, by the 1960s and 1970s, were still very independent.

And epidemiologists thinking about breast cancer were thinking about it extremely well.

And they didn't deny the familial clustering, but they did not think of it in terms of inherited genetic predisposition because they simply didn't think in those terms.

And geneticists who were thinking about cancer, and were thinking about it very well, were thinking about what we call somatic events, that is, events at the level of the cell that alter the genes specifically in the cell, for example, the activating mutations in oncogenes that are indeed responsible for very large numbers of cancers.

And it was Mike Bishop who, essentially at the same time,