early menarche, late menopause, or just not having children places a woman at greater peril. but like other factors related to cancer, a woman's genetic blueprint also exerts a major influence. if you get two genes in the same estrogen production pathway, with two copies that lead to more estrogen, then at the extremes, one group of women is making quite a bit more estrogen over her life than another woman. and those women turn out to have quite different risks of breast cancer. yet, just because a woman is at risk doesn't mean she will develop breast cancer. and, not having risk factors does not mean that she is safe from the disease. lauren: i was brought up to be very academic and very intellectual, which was an incredible gift from both my parents. but as an adult, i discovered how much i love sports. and so i've been, or until recently was, a nationally ranked competitive power lifter. i'd always been aware of cancer sort of peripherally. my father was a specialist in liver cancer research and unfortunately he died of cancer in a very abrupt way when i was around 30. and