Our culture is obsessed with breasts, yet we know remarkably little about them. But their secrets are starting to be unravelled, and nothing is more astonishing than breast milk
We love breasts, yet can't quite take them seriously. Breasts embarrass us. They're unpredictable. They're goofy. They can turn babies and grown men into lunkheads.
They appear out of nowhere in puberty, they get bigger in pregnancy, they're capable of producing prodigious amounts of milk, and sometimes they get sick. But for such an enormously popular feature of the human race, it's remarkable how little we know about their basic biology.
The urgency to know and understand breasts has never been greater. Modern life has helped many of us live longer and more comfortably. It has also, however, taken a strange toll on our breasts. For one thing, they are bigger than ever. We are sprouting them at younger ages. We are filling them with saline and silicone and transplanted stem cells to change their shape. This year marks the 56th anniversary of the first silicone implant surgery in Houston, Texas.
More tumours form in the breast than in any other organ, making breast cancer the most common malignancy in women worldwide. Its incidence has almost doubled since the 1940s and is still rising.
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