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doi: 10.1242/10.1242/jcs.00185
Book Review |
by Thomas D. Pollard and William C. Earnshaw
Saunders (2002)
805 pages. ISBN 0-7216-3997-6 £34.99
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Catching sight of a copy of Cell Biology on my desk, a colleague waved his hand at a shelf full of similar titles and rather plaintively enquired, "Do we need another one of these?" The distinguished authors might have responded to such a question with Blake's line, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." However, well aware of the risk of simply adding to the pile, they have in fact defined their remit with care. Noting that as yet there is no blueprint that completely describes how cells work, and making it clear that Cell Biology is not a biochemistry, histology or developmental biology textbook, they have compiled an anthology of 49 short, highly focussed stories — a sort of `fruitfly-on-the-wall' documentary of the lives and functions of cells. The stories fall into eight groups that are more or less as one might predict and include membranes, genomes, gene expression and nuclear organisation, signal transduction, adhesion and the extracellular matrix and the cell cycle.
The layout follows the now standard format in which short sections of text with clear headings and highlighted key words are accompanied by high quality photographs. Considerable thought has gone into the summary data contained in many tables, and the highly professional appearance is completed by copious illustrations for which Graham T. Johnson is credited on the cover. The diagrams are generally excellent, my only reservation being that some black text labels are difficult to discern against the colour of the labelled object. Many coloured molecular structures are also included, each accompanied by the Protein Data Base accession number.
A major theme of the book is to limit the amount of text and illustrate all the major points, thereby rendering the book tractable for busy students. To this end, the authors note that, although there are some 35,000 human genes, in practical terms this daunting number can be reduced to more manageable proportions by considering the detailed function of the best understood member of each protein family, thereby defining the general principles by which the whole family works. This approach works well, and succinct summaries of individual families have been formulated with care. Thus, for example, a clear and up-to-date review of protein phosphatases is provided in one table supplemented by only about two pages of text.
In Cell Biology the authors have made a valiant and in many ways successful effort to produce a distinctive approach to the subject. They probably would not suggest it was an essential purchase for students of biology or medicine. Nevertheless, Cell Biology is an informative and beautifully produced book that elucidates general themes and provides substantial detail without overwhelming the uninitiated.
Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
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