Dynamic Aspects of Biochemistry [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION This new fifth edition is destined to appear almost exactly twenty years after this book was first published. To keep pace with even a small part of biochemistry over these twenty years has been an arduous undertaking even though I have had throughout the benefit of the advice and the loyal support of many colleagues, now too numerous to list. These twenty years have indeed been years of unparalleled growth and development. The first edition of this book appeared two years before even the first International Congress of Biochemistry was held, at that time under the auspices of the International Union of Chemistry. But within a year or two a new and independent International Union of Biochemistry had already been established and International Congresses have been held at regular intervals ever since in many parts of the world, from Moscow to New York. Another index of the rate of growth is to be seen in the still increasing membership of the Biochemical Society in this country, from 1,223 in 1947 it has reached 4,259 at the time of writing. The efforts of that same Society have led in turn to the formation of a flourishing Federation of European Biochemical Societies, as well as a number of more domestic and highly specialized research groups. This is the case of only one of the numerous biochemical societies the world over. Many changes have necessarily been made in successive past editions of this book but inevitably some apparently outdated material has survived numerous revisions. The preparation of this new edition, wholly re-set and in its new format, has provided an opportunity for detailed scrutiny and extensive revision, but I have been surprised by the extent to which much of the old basic matter has remained substantially unchanged. Evidently we built better than we knew, even twenty years ago. However, much material of mainly historical interest has now disappeared and reappraisals of old ideas have become necessary. For example, the chapter dealing with the metabolism of fats called for so much revision that it has been practically re-written, especially in relation to the biosynthesis of lipids and fatty acids. Another chapter (Special Aspects of Nitrogen Metabolism), in which nobody apart from the author himself seems to have been very much interested, has accordingly been removed but its salient features are transplanted to other parts ofthe text. A judicious rearrangement of some portions of the first part of the book has provided opportunity for more discussion of biotin-dependent and tetrahydrofolate-dependent and other enzymes and related topics, expecially one-carbon metabolism, all of which received only scant attention in earlier editions. The chapters on nucleotides and nucleic