Interviewee: Barbara Weber. Barbara Weber discusses how information from the pedigrees she used in her studies could show which family members were at increased risk for cancer. (DNAi Location: Applications > Genes and Medicine > Gene testing > Barbara Weber > Information from the pedigree)

The more she [Vicky, her patient] talked about her family and what the structure of her family was, she was describing her sister who had died and her brother who was a certain age and so on. The picture in my mind of the family tree came to me and made me suspicious that this was a family that wasn't just part of a pretty big study of families but this was a specific family that we had been working on very hard to use for mapping BRCA1 before the gene was actually identified. And so what started to occur to me was that no one I don't think had really thought about this very much, I certainly hadn't and I don't think Francis [Collins, her colleague] had either. That the information that we had on this pedigree now enabled us to tell families - specifically this family and people - specifically these two women what we knew which was why there was too much breast cancer in this family and who was at risk and who wasn't.

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