Edited by Brian Matsumoto Academic Press (2002) 507 pages. ISBN 0-12-580445-8 £62.50/£89.95 (paperback)
If motorists drove their cars the way many cell biologists used their confocal microscopes, our highways would be littered with twisted wrecks of automobiles and the mangled corpses of run-over pedestrians. Everyone recognizes that driving a car is a tricky procedure that requires months of training and practice as well as a formal licensing system to verify that the required skills have been attained. In contrast, many cell biologists seem to think they can just sit down in front of a microscope and start pressing buttons without necessarily knowing what they are doing, in spite of the fact that a confocal microscope is probably at least as complicated to operate as a car. Open any cell biology journal, and you will see the grisly evidence:grainy, speckly images in which cellular structures can sometimes be discerned, but only...
