Ventilation and its components (frequency and tidal volume) appear to be determined to a significant extent by inheritance. Gene manipulation, gene identification, and functional genomics now offer powerful tools to identify the strength and mode of inheritance for ventilatory behavior under steady-state and non-steady-state conditions, in health and in disease. Conscious integration of genetic principles into existing explanatory models may increase the likelihood of detecting traits that correlate with protein systems responsible for the structures and the functional components of respiration.