Article

These are exciting times in pulmonary medicine with molecular advances steadily providing increasing insights into the complex mechanisms of lung biology and the development of disease. These advances in knowledge will, in due course, set the scene for the development of novel modes of prevention, early and precise diagnosis, and treatmentwhich the pulmonologists of the future will deploy. Thorax launches today (p 389) a series of articles on one important area of these molecular advancesgenetics. The series, as planned, is not meant to be comprehensive but is intended instead to illustrate some of the exciting advances and to convey how broadly genetic factors engage pulmonary medicine. And so the series includes articles on cystic fibrosis and antitrypsin deficiency, of course, but also articles on, for instance, inherited thrombophilia and pulmonary embolus, on the genetics of the human-microbe interaction (including the human and microbial genetics), and how these . . . [Full text of this article]