The biology of cancer
The new second edition has been comprehensively revised and updated to include major advances in cancer biology over the past six years. Updates include current information on: The tumor microenvironment, Metastatic dissemination, Tumor immunology, Cancer stem cells, The epithelial-mesenchymal transition, Multi-step tumorigenesis, Invasion and metastasis, Mutation of cancer cell genomes, Greatly expanded treatment of traditional therapy, Epigenetic contributions, MicroRNA involvement, The Warburg effect.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
22mentions
12people
2013–2026years
68% recommend27% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Hi, your friendly, local pathologist here. I'm the kind of doctor that diagnoses liver diseases, cancer, lots of infections, inflammatory processes, benign tumors, and runs the lab that a lot of other doctors use the results from to inform a lot of their other decisions.
If you really want to learn about this stuff, Robert Weinberg's The Biology of Cancer is where to start. It introduces concepts starting where a high school student could understand and carefully walks through the history of our development of knowledge until, by the end, the pithy chapters are helping novel concepts for real science flower in your brain all on their own. It's the best book of biological science I have ever read. 10/10, will read again.
- First I want to say I appreciate that you're willing to acknowledge when you're wrong or confused. As I said, you've convinced me the LLM fucked up here. I still believe LLMs are useful for learning, as long as you know the right questions to ask.
To my understanding, "tumor architecture" is used in the same manner as "tissue architecture", it just refers to the physical structure of the tissue, nothing more specific.
I recommend The Biology of Cancer - Robert A. Weinberg. It's on Anna's Archive.
- Tell you what, if you're bored and want to learn about this world, I recommend newcomers read Robert Weinberg, The Biology of Cancer, (2nd Edition): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0815342195
- For Biology, and especially for Molecular biology I'd go for:
- Albert's Molecular Biology of the cell - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0815344325/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... - It introduces basic Biochemistry, a lot of Genetics and Gene-regulation and Developmental biology. The book also touches other areas (but very vaguely) like Immunology... I think if you read this book you will be able to understand modern Molecular Biology papers.
- Biochem: Legninger's Principles of Biochemistry https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01K0PYUYQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... - Our prof taught us from this, it has great visuals and covers a lot of areas.
- Developmental biology: Gilbert's - https://www.amazon.com/Developmental-Biology-Tenth-Scott-Gil... - it introduces more genetic regulation and development for all walks of life
- Human developmental biology: Bruce M. Carlson - Human Embryology and Developmental biology - https://www.amazon.com/Human-Embryology-Developmental-Biolog... - Again it's the choice of my prof, but I loved it, great images and visual explanations.
- Anatomy: I'd definitely go for anything by Netter -> https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Human-Anatomy-Netter-Science/dp...
- Cancer: Robert A. Weinberg - The biology of cancer - https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Cancer-2nd-Robert-Weinberg/dp...
- Plant biochem: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of Plants - https://www.amazon.com/Biochemistry-Molecular-Biology-Plants... - A very good book with great illustrations.
For electronics and Embedded:
- Art of Electronics by Paul Horovitz - https://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz-ebook/d... - I saw that others also suggested it, great book
- Paul Scherz - Practical Electronics for inventors - https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Fourt... - I was introduced to electronics via this book. Not really a textbook but it's I think it's a great book to get started, it covers almost the same topics as the Art of Electronics but not as deep and with better visual explanations.
- Embedded systems - Michael Barr - Programming Embedded Systems in C and C++ - I was introduced to embedded software development by this book, when I was working for an IoT company and only had experience with systems and web programming.
Programming (my cherry picked favourites):
- Hacking: The Art of Exploitation - I love this book. I've read it after I had a few years of professional programming experience with C#. It introduces programming via C, also every example program is disassembled with GDB. It gives the reader an intuition of how C code compiled and what happens on the register level.
- C in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference - Usually when you search for good books to learn C from, you get titles like The C programming language, Deep C Secret. But I think C in a Nutshell beats all other C books. (Especially when you read it together with C related chapters from The Art of Exploitation).
- Functional Programming in Scala - https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-scal... - I saw that other people suggested SICP, and I agree with that, it does a great job introducing to some parts of functional programming. But FPIS also introduces a strictly typed aspect of FP, functional parallelism, functional designs patterns... It's a great book.
- Concurrency in Go: Tools and Techniques for Developers - https://www.amazon.com/Concurrency-Go-Tools-Techniques-Devel... - I love the Go language and how it handles concurrency. This book does a great job of describing how the go runtime works, and does a great job explaining concurrency in general. Also there are a lot of good design patters in it.
- Professor Frisby's Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming - https://github.com/MostlyAdequate/mostly-adequate-guide - It's not a textbook. This is the book that introduced me to FP. I love it, great book.
- Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective - https://www.amazon.com/dp/9332573905/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... - This was the suggested textbook for https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse351/ that was also available on Coursera. Great book.
- Personally, I prefer the classic textbook approach, so I recommend Principles of Biochemistry (Lehninger), Biological Sequence Analysis (Durbin, Eddy, Krogh, Mitchison) which is sadly pretty dated now, a general Biology (Campbell), and finally if you really want to dive down the rabbit hole of a complex biological problem with huge health applications, Biology of Cancer (Weinberg).
I've had this argument with folks before and some people seem fine learning in other ways, but I really prefer the textbook approach, especially textbooks which are basically just summaries of the current understanding of the field, with direct links to the detailed review articles.
- To the computer hackers who read these things: biology is a complex system. So complex that the most complicated system you have ever worked on seems very simple compared to it. WHen you read articles like this, be aware the scientists have extensive training in working with complex systems, and publish exciting sounding coherent narratives that are, at best, incorrect but useful working models (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong).
It's fun to speculate but to prove your case and make a real dent in human health problems is a lot harder than coming in late and saying "But wait, why don't you just..."
I heartily recommend going back to the great textbooks of these fields and reading them, rather than trying to understand things by dropping into the state of the art research (which is usually wrong, and hard to understand in detail).
Some books I recommend: The Biology of Cancer (Weinberg). After you read this book you'll have a better understanding of why doctors and scientists cringe when people say "cure cancer".
Molecular Biology the Cell (Alberts, etc). After you read this book you'll have a much better understanding of the full complexity that scientists have to deal with in complex cellular systems.
Molecular Biology of the Gene (watson, etc). Can't say much about this book except that's it's a classic reference.
What makes these three books exception is that they support all their factual claims with direct links to the papers that established the facts. And they provide you with the skills to evaluate modern research. But nothing compares to actually going to grad school and participating in the research- once you see how the grants are made, the experiments are, and the papers are written, you'll understand why trying to understand biology by press release is like trying to understand assembly language by watching a Steve Jobs product announcement.
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