BRCA1 and cancer: The availability of a limited number of large multi-generational cancer families and thus the small chance of meiotic recombination events to help refine chromosomal regions for identifying gene candidates posed considerable challenges for discovering BRCA1 and BRCA2. With the completion of The Human Genome Project [15] and advances in understanding the biology of these genes, other strategies, largely favouring a candidate gene approach, have been applied in the identification of new candidate hereditary factors.