TALKING TURKEY: Michele Carbone’s “office” in the Turkish village of Sarihidir. He traveled to the country to study cases of mesothelioma and try to determine the environmental or genetic drivers of the disease.COURTESY OF MICHELE CARBONE
Twenty years ago, when Michele Carbone first started studying malignant mesotheliomas (MM), nobody knew that genetics played a significant role in the development of the tumors, which grow in the mesothelium—the innermost layer of cells lining the insides of body cavities—and are associated with asbestos exposure. “Until 2011, when eventually we published that we had found the gene, many in the field thought I was crazy, and that there was not such a thing as a meso gene,” Carbone told The Scientist in an email. But he believed that the cancers had a genetic component, and he found an MM-predisposition gene, BRCA1-Associated Protein 1 (BAP1), which was very often mutated in patients from two US families with a high incidence of mesothelioma.
Most recently, Carbone’s ...
