Cancer, although a dreadful disease, is at the same time a fascinating biological phenotype. Around 1980, cancer was first attributed to malfunctioning genes and, subsequently, cancer research has become a major area of scientific research supporting the foundations of modern biology to a great extent. To unravel the human genome sequence was one of those extraordinary tasks, which has largely been fuelled by cancer research, and many of the fascinating insights into the genetic circuits that regulate developmental processes have also emerged from research on cancer
