Interviewee: Mark Skolnick. Mark Skolnick talks about moving on after the discovery of BRCA1 to find and clone another gene associated with breast cancer, BRCA2. (DNAi Location: Applications > Genes and medicine > Gene hunting > The finish line > Onto BRCA2)

Well just after we found BRCA1 we were then able to separate the whole set of families we had into those that were linked to BRCA1 and those that showed no linkage. So one member of our team, David Goldgar, teamed up with another player who hadn't been much of a player in the BRCA1 race, Mike Stratten, in an attempt to actually look at linkage information for those unlinked families, for the families that were not likely to be BRCA1 gene-carriers, and to look for the next gene, BRCA2. And why did we do it? We did it because it was the next logical step, your families are now purified, in that you have a clean set of just BRCA2 families. If we're going to offer diagnostic we want to offer a complete diagnostic, that is for both genes, not just one gene, so it was the logical next step for us.

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