When I was first diagnosed, I was very afraid, of course.
When you hear the word "cancer," you think the worst.
You get the diagnosis of cancer, and you're
sitting in a surgeon's office.
That's kind of a dark moment.
I entered the University of Chicago about 2 o'clock
on a very dark night, as soon as I got in here,
I felt like I was enveloped with loving hands.
I found out through a biopsy that I had a stage-I tumor.
And interestingly, you would almost
think that that would be devastating news,
but frankly, I felt sort of like the most fortunate, lucky
person to have been diagnosed because it was really early.
It's not everyone who has a genetic predisposition that
gets cancer.
So the question is, why do some people get it and others don't?
And if we can figure that out, we really
would be able to figure out how to prevent it in everybody.
We have not had any change in our recommendation
for how women should get screened for decades.
And now that we have the genomic tools,
why not take advantage of that?
So we're in this era of personalized medicine,
or precision medicine.
We know the average lifetime risk for breast cancer is 12%.
But that's average.
People aren't average.
They're personal.
So this concept of one-size-fits-all no longer
applies.
Improving access to care, but also,
increasing your knowledge to all of this information, I think,
is really important.
Our ability to sequence DNA at a very deep level, very quickly,
and very inexpensively means that we
can study our families in a way that
wasn't possible in the past.
The Pinsky family has essentially, funded
a graduate student who's working on BRCA1
in bone-marrow function.
And that's incredibly motivating to know
that someone is out there and thinks
your work is really important.
When you have the ability to provide pathways
for people who are smarter than yourself, for people who
are passionate about changing the world about research,
I view that as a blessing.
Our hope is that the work you're doing today
saves someone else's mom's life 10 years from now.
I had to make sure that I kept a positive attitude about it
because I do believe, along with treatment, your state of mind
has got to be in the right place.
I'm very well aware of the fact that many people haven't had
the same outcome that I have.
As these tears start to well up now,
they're not tears of sadness, they're not tears of sorrow.
Their actually tears of joy, that you realize you've
come from one side of a storm to another.
The thing that we talk about in our family all the time
is the fact that every generation has had a better
outcome than the one before.
And I think that the hope that we
give our kids, and our nieces, and nephews
is that every generation, there's
been sort of a quantum leap.
Help light the path to progress.
Help light the path to the future.
Help life the path to wisdom.
To discovery.
To knowledge.
To hope.
Help light the path to a breakthrough.
To a breakthrough.
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