The containment of cell growth is at the core of the homeostatic regulation of metazoans and
considerable progress has been made in the understanding of how this is achieved. Most
knowledge comes from the isolation of molecu les with positive and negative regulatory effects
on cell proliferation and most emphasis so far has been on these molecules. Some of these
molecules are already available for therapeutic purposes and others look promising in this
respect. This volume gives examples of such approaches. The understanding of the control of
cell growth is also fundamental to grasp phylogenic and ontogenic development. Why organisms
have developed increasingly sophisticated mechanisms that control their size and that of their
organs how different cells originate some destined for renewal and repair others for
specialized functions in a postmitotic state or evolving through division others like the
germinal cells waiting for the signal to start another organism. There is one mechanism of
growth containment however about which we know very little. It concerns the structural
characteristics of the cell i.e. the relationship between structure and function. How
structure can change the response to identical signals. The positive and negative growth
regulators may be conserved but the structure and organization of the genetic material and of
other cell components differ widely and are responsible to a great extent for the differences
in cell proliferative behaviour.
