Understanding Cancer: From Basic Science to Clinical Practice

Malcolm Alison, Catherine Sarraf Cambridge University Press, £19.95, pp 277 ISBN 0 521 56751 3

It is getting harder to write comprehensive textbooks covering research into cancer and clinical practice for its management. The explosion in knowledge of basic science that is relevant to cancer is well recognised. The increasing complexity of clinical practice and clinical research is equally pressing. Against this background, Malcolm Alison and Catherine Sarraf have taken a major challenge to write a postgraduate text that will allow people to understand cancer. They have succeeded certainly to a substantial degree.

The book is structured in the traditional way for textbooks on this subject, going through causes, genetics, tumour biology, cell proliferation, the pathological assessments of tumours, and some discussion of cancer treatments. It is clearly written and benefits from a consistency possible when two authors do all the work and …