The following is an edited excerpt of a longer story.
In today’s New York Times, the actress Angelina Jolie published a remarkably forthcoming op-ed about getting a double mastectomy. Jolie carries a variant of a gene called BRCA1 that makes women highly likely to develop breast and ovarian cancer.
The initials in BRCA1 stand for breast cancer. Its name reflects how it was discovered: scientists found it as they were searching for the cause of the disease. But such names are really misnomers. After all, genes don’t simply sit in our DNA so that they can mutate in some people and make them sick. Normally, they have a job to do. In the case of BRCA1, there are many jobs. For one thing, it protects DNA from harmful mutations that can arise as it’s getting replicated. And if DNA does get damaged, the BRCA1 protein helps fix it. It joins together with several teams of other proteins, and each team carries out a different part of the complex task of DNA repair.
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BRCA1, in other words, normally keeps our cells in good shape. If it mutates, though, it can’t do its jobs properly.
View the full story here: Tracing Breast Cancer’s History
