Health committee  You give my study.... You gave all the time for your question to Dr. Gordon, who.... I have 30 seconds now. Okay. Let me—

Health committee  Yes, that's a pretty good question. I've been working on prevention. I've been working on screening. I've been working on treatment over the last 25 years. I was co-discoverer of BRCA1 and BRCA2. I've spent a lot of time thinking. In 1991, when we did the first paper in The Lancet on BRCA1, I thought that, by the time we got to 2023, we'd have something better to offer than removing the breasts.

Health committee  Do you mean the mutations?

Health committee  Those are good questions. They're not really about screening, but you are 100% right. I'm running an international study of 8,000 women with the BRCA1 mutation and collecting comprehensive information on their treatments. Dr. Simard published a paper two weeks ago in JNCI, which looked at BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations in 2,500 women from many countries, including Canada.

Health committee  There are three levels of genetics. One, as Dr. Simard pointed out, is polygenic risk scores, which give you a risk based on 313 variants. That is his study. There are also major genes BRAC1, BRAC2 and PALB2. Jacques and I were actually working on that together back in the 1980s.

Health committee  It's not so much that we should do the screening as we should do the testing. One of the most important things, I believe, is that the current policy in Ontario and in most provinces is that we do genetic testing once a woman has developed breast or ovarian cancer. By that time, I think it's a little late.

Health committee  They are opinions. I mean, there are no facts here. There are scientific interpretations. There are facts and then the interpretation of them. We all have our own way of interpreting data.

Health committee  Thank you very much. I'm a professor at the Dalla Lana school of public health at the University of Toronto, and I'm grateful to the federal government. I hold the Canada research chair in breast cancer, which I've held for the past 21 years. I've been a professor at Women's College Hospital and, for 25 years, have focused almost entirely on breast cancer.

Health committee  I have another minute? Okay. I've been studying breast cancer in all its formats for 25 years. Much of what I study is early detection. We have to think of the concept that mammography works. Mammography finds cancers when they're small and node-negative. There's no doubt that a mammogram will pick up a cancer when it's small and node-negative.