Retinoblastoma, the most common intraocular malignancy of children, has served as an important paradigm for understanding the events involved in neoplastic transformation. Much of the contemporary molecular description of human cancers stems directly from experimental approaches first developed to study this childhood tumour. This analytical methodology has demonstrated a major role for heritable predisposition in tumourigenesis, provided evidence for tissue pleiotropy of cancer genes, and revealed a more precise estimation of the number, activity, and location of other tumour suppressor loci.