In agreement with the housekeeping role for autophagy, cancer was the first disease that was linked to a deficiency in the autophagic pathway with the proposal that Beclin1 functions as a tumor suppressor gene, since it was found to be monoallelically deleted in a high percentage of ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers [10, 19]. The gene discussed is BECN1; the disease is prostate carcinoma.