Study debunks ignorant misconception on breast cancer

Mickey passed this item along from Yahoo News (Breast cancer genes can come from father)

A deadly gene's path can hide in a family tree when a woman has few aunts  and older sisters, making it appear that her breast cancer struck out of  nowhere when it really came from Dad.Half of genetic breast cancers are inherited from a woman's father, not  her mother. But unless Dad has female relatives with breast cancer, the faulty  gene may have been passed down silently, without causing cancer. (Men can get  genetic breast cancer, too, but it's not common.)Weitzel said doctors often overlook the genetic risk from the father's side  of the family.

The large majority of genes are on the 22 pairs of chromosomes that one gets equally from both parents.  Although breast cancer is expressed almost exclusively in females, it always surprised me when people assumed it was only passed from female to female.  No known mechanism of inheritance has such a transmission pattern.