| The present book grew out from a lecture course I have taught for more than 5 years,
often together with colleagues who covered topics and cancers they are more
familiar with than myself. These lectures were mainly attended by biology and
medical students well advanced in their curricula, but also by clinical trainees doing
cancer research in the lab, and by graduate students and postdocs having entered
cancer research from different fields, including chemistry, pharmacology,
developmental genetics, physics, and even mathematics. This experience reflects
how cancer research, cancer prevention, and even cancer treatment increasingly
become interdisciplinary efforts.
While writing the book I had this motley group of people in mind, figuring that
they all, with their different backgrounds, could make use of an introduction to the
molecular biology of human cancers. Specifically, I felt that a textbook for more
advanced students was required to fill a gap between standard textbooks on one
hand and specialized reviews or even original research papers on the other hand.
Moreover, the textbooks on molecular biology and genetics are usually read by
biologists and those on pathology and clinical oncology only by medical students.
Accordingly, for biologists and chemists medical terms had to be introduced, and for
the readers from the medical profession some general molecular biology had to be
explained. So, please do not scoff if some statements in this book are found on the
first five pages of the standard textbook in your specialty. However, this is neither a
book on biochemical mechanisms nor on clinical oncology. So, if you do not
understand medical terms or molecular issues in the book, please borrow a textbook
from a student of the other discipline or (better…) ask them to explain. |
