We hope you'll find being a part of this project both fun and educational. As a member of the Registry, you'll learn a lot about both smoking and genetics. You'll also have the satisfaction of knowing that you and your family are contributing to cutting-edge research that may help in finding new ways to prevent and treat smoking. Most people know that their genes determine a lot about them. Your genes determine whether you're male or female, and whether your eyes are blue or green or brown.
Smoking is too complex and too multifaceted a behavior to be caused by a single gene.
Still, there is a lot of good evidence from twin studies showing that smoking has a strong tendency to run in families. We live in a society where tobacco is readily available, and where the large majority of teenagers experiment with it at least briefly. Yet not everyone goes on to become a regular daily smoker. These are some of the questions we hope to answer over the course of the Smoker Sibling Registry project. By studying families that include both smokers and nonsmokers we hope to find clues about genetic differences between people who smoke and people who don't.