The nature of cancer cannot be understood without knowledge of the biology of normal cells, and vice versa. The specificity of molecular oncology experimentation is that studies in this area must clarify biology of a tumor cell and its characteristic features such as autonomic growth, immortalization, invasion, or evolution. It is a very difficult but also a very interesting task. Studies in this field sequentially add new blocks in the erection of the building of our knowledge of the nature and behavior of tumor cells. Molecular events and their cellular consequences are inseparably linked in the molecular biology of tumor growth.
Many prejudices still exist in basic oncology.
We will just mention a few. It is still widely believed that constitutive stimulation of cell proliferation exhausts the nature of cancer, that transformation means malignant transformation or that there is antagonism between the mechanisms of differentiation and transformation. In reality, there is a large and evident distance between redundant proliferation usually appearing as the result of viral or spontaneous transformation and a malignant clone able to form a tumor in an organism. The problem of the relation between differentiation and tumor transformation includes not only antagonism but also the interaction of these processes in tumor formation. The papers of this issue have been written by distinguished experts in basic oncology.