Scientists have known for years why more than 1 million people die of lung cancer every year—smoking. Thus, when it came to looking for a genetic basis to lung cancer, “there was a lot of skepticism” about the importance of such research, says molecular epidemiologist Neil Caporaso of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
But evidence that lung cancer tended to run in families suggested that there might be a hereditary component of the disease after all, and early studies identified genes that correlated with an increased susceptibility to the cancer. Such research, however, was limited by the technology of the time, which restricted the investigations to just one candidate gene and only a few hundred cases and controls per study. “While we found some [genes with] weak effects, this was thought to be unsatisfying,” Caporaso recalls, “and we really looked to new ...
