ABSTRACT
About one in five of us will die of cancer, but that is not why we devote a chapter to this disease. Cancer cells break the most basic rules of cell behavior by which multicellular organisms are built and maintained, and they exploit every kind of opportunity to do so. These transgressions help to reveal what the normal rules are and how they are enforced. As a result, cancer research helps to illuminate the fundamentals of cell biology—especially cell signaling (Chapter 15), the cell cycle and cell growth (Chapter 17), programmed cell death (apoptosis, Chapter 18), and the control of tissue architecture (Chapters 19 and 22). Of course, with a deeper understanding of these normal processes, we also gain a deeper understanding of the disease and better tools to treat it.
