It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick

Cancer of the Breast

The list of famous women who have had breast cancer contains some extraordinary pairings that on the face of it suggest something other than coincidence: both of Charlie’s brunette Angels, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith; the American singer-songwriters Carly Simon and Sheryl Crow; similarly the Australian pop divas a generation apart, Olivia Newton-John and Kylie Minogue; the classical actresses Bette Davis and Greta Garbo; and the diametrically opposite feminist personalities Suzanne Somers and Gloria Steinem. But at a lifetime incidence of one in nine contemporary women having breast cancer, such a list is not unusual, shocking as it is.

Less well known is the fact that lung cancer is even more common in women and, given ...