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Jennifer Byrne still feels stressed remembering the evening, six years ago, when she recognized the magnitude of the problem. It was a Saturday, and Byrne’s family members “were all out in the living room watching television, like normal people,” she recalls. At her computer in another part of the house, Byrne was on PubMed digging into a handful of suspiciously similar papers investigating an obscure human gene’s connection to various cancers. On a hunch, she plugged a combination of terms into PubMed’s search, including the name of a different gene containing a nucleotide sequence that she’d seen in two studies so far. Up popped around a dozen more of what looked like cookie-cutter papers.
“I just sat there and cried,” remembers the University of Sydney cancer researcher and director of biobanking for New South Wales Health Pathology. “I just went, ‘Oh, my God, like, ...
