The revolution in cell and molecular biology presents an unprecedented opportunity to develop an understanding of neoplastic diseases. The emerging technologies resulting from this revolution also present an opportunity to make the diagnosis and staging of neoplastic diseases more accurate. Unfortunately, the integration of these technologies into current clinical practice is not a simple task. The problems associated with the clinical applications of these technologies include standardization and simplification of the technologies so that they can be established in nonresearch institutions, selection of those technologies which provide clinically meaningful information, and finally, the implementation of large-scale clinical trials which will permit multivariate statistical analyses to determine if performance of the new studies actually add to a physician's ability to diagnose and stage cancer patients. In the future, the staging of patients with neoplastic diseases will include anatomic studies together with morphologic and biologic studies of the tumor cells. Data derived from these studies will be used to assess each patient's risk status regarding the likelihood of local and distant metastases being present. These highly accurate estimates of risk status will lead to an improvement in our ability to make individualized recommendations for therapy.