...they are also associated with an increased risk of prostate and pancreatic cancer, among others. Because this is not widely understood, testing is not being done for the right people at the right time. In previous decades, people had described hereditary breast cancer and hereditary ovarian cancer as distinct entities, on the basis that such cancers cluster in families. ...some investigators have suggested renaming the gene PALB2 as BRCA3. MARY-CLAIRE KING Cancer - genetics pioneer In the mid-1970s, Mary-Claire King (pictured) was the first to recognize that hereditary breast and ovarian cancer could be accounted for by a single gene; in 1990, she and her group at the University of California, Berkeley, identified the location of the BRCA1 gene13,14.