During October 18-31, 1980, the first course of the Inter- national School of Pure and Applied Biostructure, a NATO Advanced Study Institute was held at the "Et tore Majorana Center for Scien- tific Culture" in Erice, Sicily, co-sponsored by national and international agencies. The subject of the course was "Cell Growth", with participants (from 16 different countries) selected worldwide. The study of cell growth has been one of humanity's most challenging problems and it has been approached from many differ- ent points of view, such as biochemistry, genetic engineering, cell biology, zoology, oncology, immunology, biophysics and a few other fields. It has been very difficult to keep such varied points of view all in one room and in one audience, because of the heterogeneity of background and inherent difficulty of communica- tion, with occasional nominalistic rather than factual debates.
This Institute aimed to bypass those limitations by approaching in a structured and tutorial fashion the problem of cell growth in three dimensions: (1) in terms of the various disciplines involv- ed, from molecular to cellular biology, from genetic engineering to clinical oncology, from biophysics to immunology; (2) in terms of the system studied, from prokaryotes to eukaryotes and cancer cells; (3) in terms of the various levels of macromolecular orga- nization, from membrane to cytoskeleton and chromatin.