The cloning of the fragile histidine triad(FHIT) gene at 3p14.2 in 1996 (Ohta et al, 1996) and the subsequent reports demonstrated frequent allelic deletion, aberrant FHIT transcripts in primary lung cancers (Fong et al, 1997), cell lines of small cell and nonsmall cell type (Yanagisawa et al, 1996). The gene discussed is FHIT; the disease is lung cancer.