Edited by B.J.A. Furr

2006

It is over 100 hundred years since the Glaswegian surgeon James Beatson showed that many breast cancers were dependent on the ovaries for their growth. Some time later oestrogen was shown to be the ovarian factor responsible for the development and growth of many breast cancers in both premenopausal and postmenopausal women, in whom it was produced from adrenal androgens by peripheral tissues and by the tumours themselves.