1981 Articles

Cancer Cell Biology: Neoplastic and Normal Cells in Culture . J. M. Vasiliev and I. M. Gelfand. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1981. xiv, 372 pp., illus. $79. Developmental and Cell Biology Series, 8.

Pollack, Robert

Cell culture has been a powerful technique for modeling the earliest steps in the development of neoplasia. This is so because many tumors seem to arise by stable mutational change in a single cell of the body, because many normal cell types grow well in a dish, and because many of the agents that cause tumors also cause simple cultured cells to become the progenitors of malignant cell lines. This book aims to describe and discuss the comparative characteristics of the processes regulating cell proliferation, differentiation, and morphogenesis in normal and neoplastic cells in cell cultures. It begins with a 50-page introduction that describes the in vitro systems of transformation of fibroblastic cells by viruses and chemicals. The body of the book then deals with two major subjects. Cellular morphology in normal and transformed cultures, the authors' home ground, is covered through careful discussions of the cell structures associated with cell shape and locomotion and the changes in these structures attendant upon oncogenic transformation. The second major subject is the rather small set of growth-selective in vitro transformation assays now in use. These include assays for loss of anchorage dependence, density-dependent growth inhibition, and the requirement for serum factors. This part of the book could easily have been a mere list, but the authors have managed to put most everything in a logical order.