"Every once in a while, someone truly extraordinary comes by our show and our next guest certainly qualifies as one of those people," Rachael says, while welcoming Susan G. Komen for the Cure founder Nancy Brinker to the studio. "A whole generation has gone by since I created this organization in memory of my only sister, Susan, who died of the disease when she was 36 in 1980 and asked me to promise her that I would end breast cancer," Nancy explains. "That's where the organization has come from."

She details her relationship with her sister in her new book, Promise Me, and points out how much progress has been made in the past 30 years. "In the days when she was diagnosed and lived and died, people only lived five years or longer if they had early stage disease 74 percent of the time," Nancy explains. "Today, in America, it's 98 percent!"

Nancy is also currently serving as World Health Organization's Goodwill Ambassador for Cancer Control, so Rachael asks the ambassador to share the top three things every woman should know about breast cancer:

1. "It's many different diseases. You know, we used to think it was one disease ... there were a few drugs on the shelves in those days. Today, it is a series of many different kinds of breast cancer, there are 100s of therapeutics available now, and still the thing we say is the earlier it can be detected, the better your chances are of having almost no mutilation or really, very extreme surgery and if you have to be treated there are a lot of targeted therapies now."

2. "We're working very hard on a bio-marker test, which will detect proteins in the blood which tell us if the disease is progressing. We hope that that will be very soon in the public, [those] now undergoing trials seems to be 80 - to sometimes 85 percent effective- that's really what we need. So that's huge!"

3. Early stage breast cancer is essentially curable if you find it early enough, it's so important," she says. "The biggest issue is to have sort of a genetic essay done. Speak with your physician, because you need to understand - do you have a genetic basis for having early screening done? If you don't, being vigilant about your own body is never a bad thing. If you have a change, seek care, seek someone to help you with it," she says, while offering a personal example of how early detection can be a life saver. "I had breast cancer a few years after my sister died - and that's how I found my disease."

Related Links

Susan G. Komen for the Cure