Grizzi Fabio, Chiriva-Internati Maurizio
Laboratori di Medicina Quantitativa, Istituto Clinico Humanitas IRCCS, 20089 Rozzano, Milan, Italy.
Cancer Cell Int. 2006 Feb 15;6:4. doi: 10.1186/1475-2867-6-4.
Cancer is one of the most complex dynamic human disease. Despite rapid advances in the fields of molecular and cell biology, it is still widely debated as to how neoplastic cells progress through carcinogenesis and acquire their metastatic ability. The need to find a new way of observing anatomical entities and their underlying processes, and measuring the changes they undergo, prompted us to investigate the Theory of Complexity, and to apply its principles to human cancer. Viewing a neoplasm as a system that is complex in time and space it is likely to reveal more about its behavioral characteristics, and this manner of thinking may help to clarify concepts, interpret experimental data, indicate specific experiments and categorize the rich body of knowledge on the basis of the similarities and/or shared behaviors of very different tumors.
癌症是人类最复杂的动态疾病之一。尽管分子生物学和细胞生物学领域取得了迅速进展，但关于肿瘤细胞如何通过致癌作用发展并获得转移能力仍存在广泛争议。由于需要找到一种观察解剖实体及其潜在过程并测量其变化的新方法，促使我们研究复杂性理论，并将其原理应用于人类癌症。将肿瘤视为一个在时间和空间上都很复杂的系统，可能会揭示更多关于其行为特征的信息，这种思维方式可能有助于澄清概念、解释实验数据、指明具体实验，并根据非常不同肿瘤的相似性和/或共同行为对丰富的知识体系进行分类。
