Background: The standard treatment for patients with advanced non-small cell cancer is chemotherapy. The two drug combination, carboplatin (Paraplatin) and paclitaxel (Taxol), is commonly used as the first treatment. Unfortunately, standard treatment with chemotherapy only shrinks the cancer in about 30% of patients that receive it. There is no way to predict who will or won't benefit from this treatment. The researchers at the University of Michigan would like to determine if the genes of the lung cancers in patients enrolled in this study will help predict whether or not the tumors shrink when exposed to standard chemotherapy. The goal is to find a set of lung cancer genes that will predict successful treatment with carboplatin and paclitaxel in patients with non-small cell lung cancer.