Neoplasms: 1

I have written a book, Neoplasms: Principles of Development and Diversity, which will be published October 1, 2008. Amazon and Barnes and Noble are already taking pre-publication orders for the book.

Neoplasms explains what causes cancer, how cancer develops, and why we see the types of neoplasms (tumors) that occur in man and other animals (tumor speciation). Once we understand the principles of tumor development and speciation, we can build a biological classification of neoplasms. The last section of the book shows how we can use a classification of neoplasms to develop class-based methods to eliminate cancers and precancers (through prevention, diagnosis and treatment). To regular readers of this blog, these are all famililar themes.

When I was writing the book, there were many subjects that I had to cut out from the final text. These consisted mostly of complex topics that could not be included due to length limitations (the book is 464 pages, as it is).

Over the next few months, I will be writing a long series of blogs containing material that was excluded from the book or that was included in a shortened form. This blog should be of interest to cancer specialists and to biomedical informaticians who want to see how tools of the post-information age (ontologies, public databases, mathematical models, collective data analysis) can be be used to conquer diseases.

-Copyright (C) 2008 Jules J. Berman

key words: cancer, tumor, tumour, carcinogen, neoplasia, neoplastic development, classification, biomedical informatics, tumor development, precancer, benign tumor, ontology, classification, developmental lineage classification and taxonomy of neoplasms