Hooray for breast cancer research!
It looks like questions are being answered concerning the genetics of breast cancer, and in fact, may be the most important genetic discoveries since 1994.
The findings could lead not only to better understandings of breast cancer, but better ways to identify and treat the disease. Good shit.
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This information is useful, but we can't DO anything about our genetics even if we know about them. Whereas, we can do something about other risks of breast cancer such as toxic chemicals, which interact with our DNA. Check out my blog on the WIMN website:
http://www.wimnonline.org/WIMNsVoicesBlog/?p=587
No, we can't change our genetics, but we can:
1) screen women to determine if they are at risk and teach high-risk women to lower their risk;
2) give more intensive and frequent screenings to high-risk women;
3) figure out how the genes work to increase the risk of breast cancer and, hopefully, disable those genes or negate their effects.
Hooray! :) (Also, not to be a complete man's rights person - just a "yay human rights" person - but there's now a lot of blue-ribbon stuff for prostate cancer. No one likes it when people die young - and I'm happy that the breast cancer awareness campaign is helping women with breast cancer AND increasing awareness of other cancers.)
Our obsession with genetics has more to do with our obsession with religion than with any real medical insight this line of research can give us.
The question that keeps me up at night is this: why has 80+ years of research on cancer done virtually nothing in terms of mortality rates, while only 25 years of research on HIV has turned it from a fatal disease into a treatable condition like diabetes?