X-ray Diffraction Studies in Biology and Medicine

NUCLEIC ACID. By J. F. Danielli and R. Brown. Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, No. 1. Cambridge University Press. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1947. vi + 290 pp. $8.50 This volume presents the papers read at a symposium of the Society for Experimental Biology held at Cambridge in July 1946. The reader will find much basic material pertaining to current concepts of the chemistry and biology of the nucleic acids and related compounds. The far-reaching importance of these substances becomes immediately apparent from the diversity of fields to which their study has contributed. One gets glimpses of applications to cytology and cytopathology, to biological chemistry and to bacteriology, to genetics and oncology, and to cellular physiology in its most basic sense. The outstanding achievements of the Institute for Cell Research of Stockholm are well represented in the papers of Casparsson and Hyden, and point to the great promise which this work holds for the future. M. TAGER