Pharmacogenetics: Heredity and the Response to Drugs.

Here is a book worth knowing of. Written by a pharmacologist for pharmacologists and clinical investigators and hence clinicians who do not realize how much they might gain by consulting a geneticist now and then, it demonstrates such is not a one-way street. Equally important, it provides a glimpse into the medical future. Particularly for the pediatrician, it brings together in lucid fashion insight into microbial genetics and its relationship to antibiotic resistance, the potential of tissue culture methods for uncovering mechanisms of poorly understood host response to drugs or of host resistance to anticancer agents. Proceeding up the evolutionary scale to insects and resistance to insecticides—written in a style analogous to that of the Scientific American —then to pharmacology and laboratory animals, Kalow next focuses on man—first, in terms of hereditable variation in response to drugs (succinylcholine, isoniazid, etc.) and then of hereditable disease in which altered response to