by Thomas D. Pollard and William C. Earnshaw Saunders (2002)805 pages. ISBN 0-7216-3997-6 £34.99
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...
