Preface
In the Fall 1974, plans for a "Workshop on In Vitro Chemical Carcinogenesis" were initiated at the suggestion of Drs. Umberto Saffiotti and I. Bernard Weinstein and developed together with Dr. Donald W. King as part of the conferences held at the Given Institute of Pathobiology, University of Colorado, Aspen. It was felt that this was an important research area on which to hold an initial small workshop that would bring together most of the leading investigators in the field, at a time when several laboratories were attempting to establish criteria for in vitro neoplastic cell transformation following chemical treatment.
The workshop, chaired by Drs. Saffiotti and Weinstein, took place from July 27 to August 1, 1975, and it included 33 participants. It was supported by the National Cancer Institute and consisted of lectures, laboratory demonstrations, and laboratory work actively involving all participants. The workshop was primarily devoted to reviewing laboratory methods, transformation criteria, and markers. The unique environment and intellectual atmosphere of the Given Institute at Aspen were particularly stimulating and the workshop succeeded in fostering friendly, uninhibited, and constructive discussion and cooperation among investigators from different laboratories. The participants found it a unique opportunity toreview each other's experimental material and to resolve controversial questions of interpretation directly on site in the laboratory.
The participants in the 1975 workshop expressed their desire to meet again in 1976 for a conference that would allow the findings of the leading research groups to be demonstrated to a larger audience.
On this basis, a "Seminar and Workshop on In Vitro Carcinogenesis" was planned and organized by Drs. Umberto Saffiotti and Donald W. King with advice from several participants, and it was held at the Given Institute of Pathobiology in Aspen from July 18 to 23, 1976. Drs. U. Saffiotti and D. W. King served as chairmen of the conference and Dr. Paul 0. P. Ts'o as chairman of the laboratory workshop. This seminar was part of the series held at the Given Institute entitled "Advances in Cancer Biology" and supported by a grant (No. 5R13CA15961) from the National Cancer Institute.
The present publication is based on the presentations made at this conference. The members of the seminar's faculty agreed that it would not be desirable to publish the detailed papers which werepresented orally, since many involved discussion of previously published results. Several good reviews were also recently published by some of the participants. A need was recognized, however, tocollect in a single publication the extensive literature that has developed in the area of neoplastic transformation of cells in culture by chemical and physical agents. The editors suggested and the faculty agreed that this publication be devoted to an extensive bibliography on the subject, with brief papers serving as a guide tothe literature on different topics. Selected papers give more extensive reports of previously unpublished new advances. In addition, a section is devoted to the publication of detailed laboratory procedures which are not available in the current literature.
The editors have arranged the sequences of papers around main topics and edited their format and bibliography for consistency. They wish to express their appreciation to the authors for their cooperation; to Dr. D. W. King, Director of the Given Institute of Pathobiology, for his sponsorship of the Conference; and to both Dr.D. W. King and Dr. Cecilia Fenoglio, Department of Pathology, ColumbiaUniversity, for their editorial advice.
The National Cancer Institute Carcinogenesis Technical Report Series, in which this volume appears, was established early in 1976, at the initiative of Drs. U. Saffiotti and N. P. Page, then respectively responsible for the NCI Carcinogenesis Program and for its Carcinogen Bioassays and Program Resources Branch, as a means to publish documentation methods, procedures, and findings in the field of Carcinogenesis bioassays and research, particularly when format limitations make it difficult to report detailed data through the conventional scientific journals.
It is hoped that this volume will be a useful contribution to the rapidly developing field of Carcinogenesis studies by in vitro culturemethods.
Of the participants in the Symposium, four were unable to contribute directly to this volume: J.A. DiPaolo, M.W. Lieberman, F.H. Ruddle, and I.E. Weinstein.