Dr Henry Lynch obituary
In 1962 a medical intern sat with a man recovering from alcohol poisoning in a veterans' hospital in the US state of Nebraska. Henry Lynch, who has died aged 91, listened as the young farm worker told him that he liked to drown his sorrows because, as with everyone else in his family, he was pretty much guaranteed to die young of cancer.
Lynch, with a background in genetics and psychology, wanted to know more about this family and its high prevalence of cancer. His investigations into this and other such families led to the discovery of hereditary non-polyposis colorectal cancer, which in 1984 was renamed Lynch syndrome. They also resulted in the discovery of breast-ovarian cancer syndrome, which in turn led to the identification of the BRCA genes.
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