In a large‐scale and exhaustive study of cancers by the IMPACT team at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre by Jonsson and collaborators, where cancer patients being treated at the hospital were uniformly ascertained and whose tumour and germline genomic sequences were systematically analysed by targeted sequencing, the authors were able to show that if germline BRCA1 or BRCA2 variants do contribute to the population burden of melanoma predisposition then this contribution is modest. This evidence concerns the gene BRCA1 and cancer.