Introduction

The heredity of cancer deals with familial aspects of neoplasia. “Familial aspects of neoplasia”means simply that more members of a family suffer from cancer than would be expected. Human pedigrees are examined to detect if a cancer is indeed familial, that is, is the cancer found in greater abundance than expected and thus perhaps inherited from previous generations? Understanding the heredity of cancer requires an investigation not only of the pedigree of families, that is, genealogy, but also of chromosomes, genes, and gene products. In this sense, this chapter concerns both the genetics and heredity of cancer. The term “genomics”refers to the structure and function of the entire genome of a species, including the complete DNA sequence, the regulation of its expression and how its genes and gene products function in a species. A related field is “oncogenomics”and that term pertains to the genomics of cancer. Oncogenomics is a rapidly evolving discipline resulting from new technology.