In 1978, Dotty was in the hospital with breast cancer, and Seymour's friend, colleague, and mentor Max Delbrück was diagnosed with cancer. Consequently, Seymour Benzer took interest in cancer biology and attended several conferences on breast cancer. Benzer later remarried with Carol Miller, a neuropathologist. Together, in the early 1980s, they used antibody staining techniques to find nearly identical genes between flies and humans.