That's the most exciting thing that I can think of, a test that can help someone to prevent getting cancer. Sisters Gerda Evans and Doone Lamb are breast cancer survivors. But 12 years ago, when Doone became the first of three families members diagnosed with the disease, they had no idea there might be a genetic predisposition. Until that time, we hadn't anticipated that we had an increased risk of breast cancer at all in our family. But within a period of three years, the three siblings were diagnosed with breast cancer so that alerted us to the fact that we might be a family at risk.
Breast cancer is the biggest killer of women in Australia today.
And of the 10,000 women diagnosed each year, about 5 per cent have a genetic mutation which forecasts its likelihood. As in all things in biology, you cannot say with 100 per cent assurety that a person will or will not have an outcome, however, what we can say on the basis of some very good studies is that that an individual that carries a mutation, a harmful mutation, in one of these genes has an extremely high probability of cancer. Dr Gregory Critchfield is the president of Myriad Genetic Laboratories, a US-based medical corporation which has patented the breast cancer gene. In Australia, public laboratories have so far ignored the patent and conducted free cancer gene tests for those identified most at risk. Now geneticists like Professor Rodney Scott are worried about the legal implications.