Book excerpt: Leukemia continues to offer the scientist a unique opportunity to gain new knowledge about the malignant transformation. As a result, this multi-authored volume, devoted to advances which have occurred over the last seven years, provides the reader with an important new understanding of leukemia, but perhaps even more important, predicts analogous, new developments in the other malignant diagnoses. In this respect, this volume represents the cutting edge of cancer research. This text is unique in that it includes in a single volume the leading contributors to their respective fields covering what the editors feel are the major advances in our knowledge of the biology and therapy of leukemia over the last seven years.