Introduction to biology and chromosomal instabilities in cancer

The recent decade has witnessed a surge of physicists to biology. Some of the activities of the participating groups focus on bona fide physics questions, posed on biological systems (such as the physics of molecular motors, for example). Another kind of research in which physicists take part alongside computer scientists and applied mathematicians, deals with questions that are of direct interest to biologists; they come under the umbrella of computational and systems biology. The topic of these lectures lies at the most biological end of this spectrum, addressing problems of clinical relevance which were posed and initiated by biologists. The objective of these lectures is to help the curious physicist to learn and to understand more about this emerging, highly interdisciplinary field of research, by providing brief introductions to molecular biology and cancer research. This is followed by a cursory review of some recent research done by the “Domany group” and its collaborations with biological and clinical labs. Furthermore, we mention (mainly in footnotes) a small subset of studies in which physicists have contributed to this field during the past years. A more detailed review of recent contributions by physicists is beyond the scope of this introductory text. The introductory nature of these lecture notes naturally induces a strong bias regarding publications cited; consequently, these lecture notes do not provide a fair, historically correct and updated review of relevant literature.