Alan Blassberg can’t enter a Cheesecake Factory restaurant without thinking about breast cancer. That’s where he was lunching when he got the call that his sister Sammy Blassberg had been diagnosed. The call would turn Blassberg from documentary filmmaker to activist. Sammy Blassberg died in 2010, at age 47. That same year, Blassberg’s other sister…
Hollywood star Angelina Jolie’s decision to make public her double mastectomy more than doubled the number of women in Britain seeking to have genetic breast cancer tests, according to a study released on Friday. Jolie, 39, who has become a high-profile human rights campaign, announced her surgery in May last year, saying she acted after…
Diagnosed at 33, Sue Friedman had already undergone treatment when she found out about the BRCA2 mutation that had given her a 9-in-10 chance of developing hereditary breast cancer. Three years later, in 1999, Friedman founded FORCE: Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered, an organization advocating for awareness of hereditary breast and ovarian cancers. And…
The stock of Myriad Genetics plunged after the Supreme Court rejected its effort to patent a human gene mutation that is linked to cancer and is common among Ashkenazi Jews. Shares of the biotech company dropped about 15% on Friday after spiraling up by about 10% on Thursday. The stock initially rocketed up by more…
When Angelina Jolie decides to have her breasts removed because she carries the BRCA1 gene — a mutation that some Ashkenazi Jewish women also have and which has been linked to breast cancer — it’s a choice that must throw many, many women for a loop. If the world’s most famous and gorgeous woman/mother/Hollywood superstar…
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