ABSTRACT
Theodor Boveri would surely be impressed, and pleased, to learn how his skeletal idea that cancer is a genetic disease of somatic cells has been fleshed out over the ensuing near century. Critical contributions to this process were the discoveries that some environmental agents known to be carcinogenic, notably ionising radiation and certain chemicals, are also mutagenic and that predisposition to cancer can be inherited in Mendelian fashion. The discovery of the Philadelphia chromosome as the first specific somatic genetic aberration associated with a particular cancer provided a capstone to this early period and has been precursor to a continuing flood of research that has provided an
ever clearer idea of the origin of cancer.1 Even the competing viral theory can be integrated into our contemporary picture of this collection of diseases.
