The Bioterrorism Sourcebook

The Biology of Cancer by Robert Weinberg is a textbook aimed at graduate biology and medical students. It covers the basic biology of cancer at the molecular and cellular level. The book begins with a brief history of the field of cancer biology as it spawned from accelerated research after World War II and into the mid-70s, when cancer biology really took off as an independent field of research. The following chapters cover the basics of cell biology and explore howmany of these mechanisms are altered in different types of cancer. The main aim of the book is to gather what has been discovered about cancer in the past 30 years and begin to distill this information into underlying laws and principles that emerge from the large amount of data collected. The book does a great job in not only presenting the facts of what has been established but also highlighting the questions that remain in the field. In a sense, the textbook is like a large collection of review articles covering everything from apoptosis to receptor signaling to mitosis and spindle assembly. The book covers an immense amount of material and is best used as a reference to review the basic principles of different aspects of cancer biology. The book contains a CD-ROM that has many additional figures and tables in Powerpoint format and some movies that correspond to each chapter. In addition, like most textbooks, the end of each chapter contains study questions useful to evaluate understanding of the presented topic. I would highly recommend this book to any graduate or medical student interested in reviewing the fundamentals of cancer biology. The book is well-written, engaging, and covers a huge amount of material and a variety of topics. It will continue to be a useful aid to have in your library for years to come, as many of the basic concepts should remain relatively accurate even as the field advances. Since this field is rapidly advancing, a new edition will be needed shortly, but for now, this book represents the latest collection of knowledge in the field of cancer biology.