Our Living Chemistry Series was conceived by Editor and Publisher to advance our newer knowledge of chemical medicine in the cause of clinical practice. The interdependence of chemistry and medicine is so great that physicians are turning to chemistry, and chemists to medicine in order to understand the underlying basis of life processes in health and disease. Once chemical truths, proofs and convictions become sound foundations for clinical phenomena, key hybrid investigators clarify the bewildering panorama of biochemical progress for application in everyday practice, stimulation of experimental research and extension of postgraduate instruction. Each of our monographs thus unravels the chemical mechanisms and clinical management of many diseases that have remained relatively static in the minds of medical men for three thousand years. Our new Series is charged with the nisus Han of chemical wisdom, supreme in choice of international authors, optimal in standards of chemical scholarship, provocative in imagination for experimental research, comprehensive in discussions of scientific medicine, and authoritative in chemical perspectives of human disorders.

Dr. Bergel of London interprets the interrelated activities of highly specific biocatalysts supporting the dynamic manifestations of cancerous processes. Tumors have qualitatively the same enzymes as normal tissues but quantitatively significant reductions in their activities. The range of values for tumors usually falls between the extremes for normal tissues, each of which reveal specific patterns of enzymic activity. Tumors thus tend to converge enzymatically to a common type of tissue but may retain, in the primary stage, the specialized enzymatic activities of the tissue of origin. Dr. Bergel compares the activities of the family of enzymes in certain tumors with those in embryonic, proliferating and resting normal tissues, evaluates the accompanying nutritional and metabolic changes and formulates chemical methods for altering certain biochemical systems as the basis for possible antitumor therapy. These recent theoretical and practical achievements of experimental and clinical oncology contribute to a better understanding of cancer in the cause of complete control and chemical prevention of this devastating disease process.