Theodor Boveri (1862-1915) was a towering figure in cell biology and cancer research during the early twentieth century. Trained as a zoologist, he probed the workings of the nucleus and cytoplasm of cells by perturbing them in invertebrate embryos. He was particularly interested in the contributions of chromosomes to cell behaviour. His speculative monograph on the connection between chromosomal anomalies and their role in cancer, published in German in 1914, sealed his scientific reputation. This monograph, an important source of the origins of contemporary cancer research, has now been translated into English for the second time by Henry Harris, a pioneer in the discovery of tumour-suppressor genes. Boveri's widow and co-worker, Marcella O'Grady Boveri, published the first translation in 1929. Realizing that German biomedical research had begun to lose its dominance worldwide and that German was no longer the sole language of science, she undertook to bring her husband's work to the attention of the non-German-speaking scientific world. Harris's translation presents Boveri's ideas in more contemporary English and is far more accessible. Frequent explanatory footnotes set the arguments in the context of recent findings and, on occasion, in light of twenty-first-cen-tury cancer research.
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