How do genes and heredity affect cancer risk for my children?
Genes are made up of DNA, the hereditary “blueprint” that makes us who we are. We have two copies of each gene. We get our genes from our parents, inheriting one copy of a gene from our mother and another copy from our father. When a parent has a mutation, there is a 50 percent chance of passing on the mutation to each of his or her children, since each child inherits either the normal copy of the gene or the copy with a mutation.
