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Molecular Biology of Human Cancers An Advanced Student’s Textbook; 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. The book is intended to provide a relatively short overview of important concepts and notions on the molecular biology of human cancers (according to the author’s opinion), including many facts essential to find one’s way in this field. It is, however, not meant to be comprehensive and probably cannot be, as our knowledge is rapidly growing. A list of other textbooks and handbooks can be found in the ‘further reading’ section of Chapter 1. This book is named ‘Molecular Biology of Human Cancers’ because molecular biology is at its center, although in some places I have attempted to put this specific angle of approach to the cancer problem into a broader, ‘real world’ perspective, particularly in Part III. ‘Human’ is supposed to stress that cancers in humans and not in other organisms or in vitro models of cancer are the main issue (most evidently in the central Part II). The plural ‘Cancers’ is to indicate that the diversity of human cancers is stressed, although common mechanisms are treated in depth. To help scan the book and find out what interests you, all chapters (except the first introductory one and the three more essay-style chapters in Part III) contain a short introductory section listing their essential points. Part I starts with a brief overview chapter, which serves mainly to define terms and introduce concepts and issues that are treated in more depth and detail in later chapters. The following chapters deal with molecules and mechanisms important in human cancers. Although these chapters contain a lot of information, they present only a fraction of what is known in this regard, since knowledge on individual molecules and their interactions is presently expanding at a particularly rapid pace. The cancers discussed in Part II are selected according to this criterion. They are therefore not necessarily the most prevalent or lethal cancers, although many of these are treated. Accordingly, the treatment of each cancer type is not comprehensive either, but focuses on those selected issues and mechanisms that we understand best.