Some Difficult Choices in Cytogenetics

It is rare for a full-fledged malignancy cytogenetics service to be started as a result of a policy decision and business plan. More often it grows from a small beginning: perhaps just one or two research assistants working on the particular interest of an oncologist, or perhaps one or two people in a preexisting general cytogenetics laboratory specializing in malignancy cytogenetics instead of the malignancy samples being shared equally between everyone. Because genetic studies of many types of malignancy are still in their early stages, then the research element is often prominent. As the findings are published and confirmed and become clinically useful, then research funding is likely to become unobtainable as the work is deemed to have become a service and should therefore be funded in the same way as other well-established clinical services such as hematology and biochemistry.