Microtechniques of Clinical Chemistry

Sturtevant's idea that crossover frequency can be used to map out genic order on a chromosome, his discovery and demonstration of Drosophila melanogaster's third chromosome, and his mapping of its fourth chromosome ; his solutions to the classic riddles posed by Oenothera and Limnaea, his discovery of position effect, and his work on the genetic basis of mosaicism. Here too are the most important of his papers on evolution, which still seem surprisingly up-to-date, including the first essay, with Dobzhansky, on the use of inversions in following the history of a species and its races. In short, its value is to a great extent historical. It is unfortunate that even as such it will often be comprehensible only to the person trained in genetics. Some short and comparatively uninformative articles have been included because a major theory of later years may be traced back to them; however, because the book's order is chronological, they are separated from those other, later essays which might make them more meaningful. Although in general Professor Lewis has managed to avoid it, this is, of course, one of the constant pitfalls of the editor who must select papers in his own field, written by one of his colleagues and friends: that his own familiarity with the work will blind him to the possibility that its meaning or importance may be almost nonexistent to a more casual reader. For the student or for the worker in the field this is an exciting book; one which shows the mechanisms by which the framework of genetics was laid down. Say what we will about the virtues of textbook surveys as against the evils of the laborious search among the primary source materials, no text can offer quite the thrill which we get from the ring of discovery behind the original author's words-particularly if the original author has as much to say and says it as well as A. Samuel Natelson's Second Edition includes analytical procedures which use modern instruments such as gas chromatography and X-ray spec-trometry. By and large, however, the bulk of the methods are the traditional ones, which reflect their sturdiness. The emphasis is on use of small samples in the range of 10 to 100 microliters. The virtue of the book lies in the accumulation of a large number of useful techniques adapted for small samples of blood or serum which can be used on …