Since this book is geared to be used by varied groups of readers such as advanced students and instructors in the fields of biology and medicine, scientists and more importantly clinicians, it is considered important to provide brief accounts of the basics of DNA damage, repair, mutagenesis and cancer. The purpose of this book is to present an updated detailed account of some important additional diseases of DNA repair. It has not been possible to cover all the DNA repair deficient diseases in this volume, hence diseases such as Bloom's syndrome, Werner's syndrome, Nijmegen breakage syndrome,...

Xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), meaning parchment skin and pigmentary dist- bance, is a rare and mostly autosomal recessive genetic disorder that was originally named by two dermatologists, the Austrian Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra and his H- garian son in law Moritz Kaposi in 1874i and 1883. 2 The earliest published record (PubMed) available on the internet is a publication in 1949 by Ulicna Zapletalova under the title, "Contribution to the pathogenesis of xeroderma pigmentosum." DEGREES It was in the late 1960s when James Cleaver (contributor of Chapter 1 of this book), at the University of...