Measurement of Alkaline Phosphatase Activity

Abstract

This book is not recommended. It is poorly conceived, contains much irrelevant information and the text is vague, undeveloped and full of errors. It consists of three short chapters (sixty-five pages in all) with no index but a short book-list for further reading at the end. I find it difficult to understand the need for a small text solely concerned with lipids and polysaccharides, molecules about as unrelated biologically as is possible. This book does little to relate these topics to each other, it does not, as might be supposed from the title, concern itself with either glycolipids or the interrelationship of carbohydrate and lipid metabolism. It gives basically separate consideration to these two classes of compound. The connection that is made (the effects of weak intra-and inter-molecular interactions on structural organization) is dealt with in a mistaken manner with constant attention to the erroneous concept of'Van der Waals bonds' and no mention of the, inherently simple, concept of entropy. The text abounds with mistakes, both descriptive and conceptual. Tex-tual errors include incorrect molecular structures for fructose, galactose, D-and t-glyceraldehyde, bloodgroup A substance, cholesterol, phosphate, hydroxide and deoxycholate. Conceptual errors include the lack of charge, and hence its effect, on amino groups at physiological pH, the (proposed) direct enzymic conversion of D-and t-sugars and phrases such as 'lowering the degree ofunsaturation tends to... increase its fluidity' concerning lipids. There are a few references to the literature scattered throughout the book but they are often incorrectly cited and, even worse, the data extracted incorrect or misleadingly (see pages 58, 59 and 61 for the full range of these errors).