Understanding cancer at the chromosome level: 40 years of progress.

The review by D.T. Hughes examined the role of cytogenetics in cancer research in 1964. Despite the technical limitations of the day, he highlighted a number of known abnormalities which were to turn out to be crucial in our understanding of cancer genetics over the subsequent 40 years. These included the Philadelphia translocation and the Burkitt's lymphoma-associated marker chromosomes. In addition, he mentioned that a deleted chromosome had been observed in an example of retinoblastoma and double-minute chromosomes in neuroblastoma. The study of these events led to the identification of the key genes involved (BCR, ABL, C-MYC, RB1 and N-MYC) and served as models for substantial further work. We review some of the technical advances in the field of molecular cytogenetics and show how they can be applied to the events reviewed by Hughes.