ABSTRACT
It is now well over 100 years since Gregor Mendel first carried out his experiments with peas and almost exactly a century since Mendel’s laws were ‘re-discovered’. It is also over a century since pathologist David von Hansemann (1890) described abnormal mitotic figures in cancer cells, and noted an association between aneuploidy (abnormal chromosomal numbers) and cancer. It is also over a century since Theodore Boveri proposed that alterations in the chromosomes were the basis of cancer formation. Remarkably, it was half a century later that the Philadelphia chromosome (discussed below) was identified.
