Author to speak on working with cancer genetics researchers

Michael Waldholz, medical and science reporter for the Wall Street Journal, will be on campus next week to talk about his most recent book, Curing Cancer: The Story of the Men and Women Unlocking the Secrets of Our Deadliest Illness.

Waldholz will speak at 4 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 28, in Hogness Auditorium at the Health Sciences Center. The event is free and open to the pubic. He plans to focus on his experience in working with cancer researchers on the book, which was published in November by Simon & Schuster.

Dr. Mary-Claire King, UW professor of genetics and medicine whose work on the genetics of breast cancer is featured prominently in the book, will also speak on her experience working with Waldholz.

The event, sponsored by University Bookstore, will be followed by a book signing.

Waldholz, co-author with Jerry Bishop of the 1990 book Genome, won the 1997 Pulitizer Prize for national reporting for his coverage of new drug treatments, including protease inhibitors, that have transformed treatment for HIV.

In Curing Cancer, he focuses on the search for genes responsible for inherited predisposition to certain cancers, and on what this new information means to both scientists and affected families.

Much of the book's first section describes work done in King's lab at the University of California at Berkeley to search for and describe the location of a defective "breast cancer gene," now known as BRCA1, on chromosome 17. King moved her lab to the UW in 1995. After moving to the UW, King announced findings that the BRCA1 gene can also halt, or suppress, breast cancer. ¶