Herbert Sauro wrote,
>Odd you should mention this topic because I had a quick look at some newly
>published biochemistry text books last weekend and was surprised to see that
>after all these years they still proudly spell out very clearly the idea of
>the rate-limiting step. I was even more surprised to see the rate-limiting
>step boldly announced in the new edition of Lehninger. It makes one wonder
>that if there are such blatant misconceptions in one part of the book, how
>are we to trust the rest of the material?
>You are right, of course, and when you consider a book like Campbell
[(1995) "Biochemistry" (2nd edn.) Saunders College Publishing,
Philadelphia], that manages to completely fail six out of the seven tests
that I applied, and to get the seventh partly wrong, you wonder whether you
can trust anything at all that she writes. (I'm not keen as a general rule
on biochemistry textbooks that show you pictures of their authors' dogs,
but I could put up with that if the biochemical information were correct.)
When a book fails as completely as this it hardly matters if you think my
seven tests a bit idiosyncratic and non-representative.
I don't know of even *one* current book that gives the correct structure of
glycogen: the two that I counted as half-right only managed to reach that
score by avoiding showing the complete structure at all. There is nothing
to suggest that they know what the real structure of glycogen is.
More to the point of this news group, the story of the new edition of
Lehninger (not included in my survey because I haven't seen it with my own
eyes) is even worse than you think, because its authors actually had quite
a lot of input from one of our members while it was in production, the
coordinating editor from the publisher having approached him for his
opinion about rate-limiting step. After taking care to explain the matter
properly he was subsequently quite cross to open the new edition and find
that his input had been completely ignored.
It was partly as a result of hearing this story in Stellenbosch in April
that I decided the time had come to start pointing some fingers in public.
Of course, anyone who writes textbooks himself is taking a risk in raising
his head above the parapet in this way, but I'm sure that if anyone accused
me of promulgating a serious error in a book I'd take care to correct it
when the opportunity arose (or to add some discussion of the criticism if I
thought it mistaken).
athel
Athel Cornish-Bowden
athel at ibsm.cnrs-mrs.frhttp://ir2lcb.cnrs-mrs.fr/~athel/homepage.htm
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