Photo: James Davies
In 1993, the breast cancer that had plagued Jane Plant since 1987 returned for the fifth time. It came in the shape of a secondary tumour – a lump in her neck the size of half a boiled egg. Doctors told her that she had only months to live.
Then a mother of two young children, Prof Plant recalls the shocked discussion she had with her husband, Peter. As scientists – she is a geochemist, he a geologist – they had both worked in China on environmental issues, and knew that Chinese women had historically very low rates of breast cancer: one epidemiological study from the Seventies showed the disease affected one in 100,000 Chinese women, compared with one in 12 in the West.
“I had checked this information with senior academics,” Prof Plant says. “Chinese doctors I knew told me they had hardly seen a case of breast cancer in years. Yet if Chinese women are on Western diets – if they go to live in the US or Australia, for example – within one generation they got the same rate. I said to Peter, ‘Why is it that Chinese women living in China don’t get breast cancer?’?”
Her husband recalled that on field expeditions his Chinese colleagues provided him with powdered milk because they did not drink it themselves. “He pointed out at that time they did not have a dairy industry. It was a revelation.”