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doi: 10.1242/10.1242/jcs.00279
Book Review |
edited by Jane Roskams and Linda Rodgers
Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory Press (2002) 272 pages. ISBN 0-87969-630-3 $24.95
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Let me start by saying this is not the sort of book you try and read cover to cover. Nor would I recommend such an attempt, noble though it may be. This is not how the book is supposed to be used. The simple fact is that the editors set out to produce a handy bench-top reference source of the reagents needed for a variety of Cold Spring Harbor manuals and that is exactly what they have achieved. Herein lies both the strengths and weaknesses of this particular book. A handy reference manual needs to be small and easy to access, and this book fills these criteria well. To the editors' credit each section is well indexed, although, personally, I thought the inclusion of attachable tags with the book, to allow the user to mark commonly referred to pages, would have been an asset. On the plus side, the blank `notes' pages are a nice feature.
Unfortunately the book has some weaknesses that I feel detract from the package. Some of these faults are not to do with the book itself but rather with this genre as a whole. Within Section One the editors describe how to make simple stock solutions (including 1 M calcium chloride and 10 mg/ml ethidium bromide); however, the way that they go about this does not encourage me to buy the book. Why? Because I believe that simply spoon-feeding individuals with `add x grams of chemical y to 1 litre of water' in no way enhances their skills base. Sure there is a short-term gain as it speeds up the making of a simple solution; however, there are no longterm gains, nor will it help them to achieve their potential. Furthermore, any seasoned investigator who needs to be told how to make a 10% (w/v) SDS solution or a 10 mg/ml ethidium bromide solution needs to brush up on their basic skills! The value of the short-term gains verses the long term is a question for each individual to ask themselves when they consider buying this book.
As one of my colleagues said, "it is the `why' which is important", and the editors have attempted to address this with fragments of useful and interesting information throughout the manual. However, this does not alleviate the fact that Lab Ref is essentially a compendium of recipes, and although the editors cross-reference to manuals, there is no cross-referencing to actual methods. Mind you, having said that, the logistics and usefulness of such an epic undertaking would be questionable.
Section Seven (Useful facts and tables) was the section that I, personally, found the most interesting, although the usefulness of the some of the information might be queried. The biggest problem with this section derived from the organisation of the tables within Section 7a, which lacked any obvious formal subdivisions — a minor oversight perhaps? Similarly, there were problems with the list of "Useful World Wide Web sites" — for example, the exclusion of the Saccharomyces genome database was glaringly obvious to me. However, when compiling these types of list it is all but impossible to satisfy everyone. In contrast, the nomenclature guide, while brief, was well organised and could prove useful to those of us who forget the correct way to annotate a gene when discussing an organism other than our own particular model.
I feel that Lab Ref is useful if you don't have access to the original Cold Spring Harbor manuals from which the methods were taken. In these circumstances, paying $24.95 for a single book that alleviates the requirement to find the original manual is a small price to pay for peace of mind.
Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
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