Lead Toxicity

Lead Toxicity by Radhey L. Singhal and John A. Thomas:

The book, Lead Toxicity, is a collection of authoritative papers written by various research scientists investigating the physiological effects of lead. Its intent is to summarize recent advances in this area. Its publisher, Urban & Schwarzenberg, considers the tome a reference book. They believe that it could prove useful to clinicians and researchers in such diverse fields as pediatrics, toxicology, internal medicine, nephrology, hematology, neurology, and environmental pharmacology, biochemistry, and physiology. The validity of this assertion, however, seems doubtful. Although Lead Toxicity does contains some favorable aspects, the book's articles tend to be highly specific. Most contain an abundance of data. They are consequently both difficult to read and difficult to understand. This book is probably only truely appropriate for scientists who are directly and actively involved themselves in lead toxicity research.

Radhey Singhal, chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Ottawa Medical School, and John Thomas, associate dean and professor of pharmacology at West Virginia University Medical Center, have collaborated as editors to create an assemblage of articles called Lead Toxicity. Their format is commonly employed among writers involved in scientific research. In fact, even integrated textbooks on scientific topics often contain chapters written by different

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monary polyamines. Included are an abundance of numerical data. The author does make an effort to clarify the table by demarcating significant values with asterisks. Even so though, the preponderance of different numbers does not make for easy reading (Kacew & Singhal, 1980, pp. 1978). Other articles in Lead Toxicity are equally as complicated. For instance, "Lead and heme biosynthesis" by Michael Moore, Peter Meredith, and Abraham Goldberg, gives a detailed account of the hemebiosynthetic pathway. While the authors' figure 1 does provide an extremely illustrative description of the pathway, the paper rigorously analyzes each and every enzyme involved. It gives both the substrates, the endproducts, and the different characteristics of the reactions (Moore et al., 1980, pp. 79115). Again, such information can really only be of practical benefit to someone with considerable expertise in the field of lead research. Besides being overly detailed, Lead Toxicity, also suffers from the fact that some of the articles included seem extraneous. Even if the editors did seek to include a diversity of material, the presence of the article "Chronic effects of lead in nonhuman primates" by Robert Willes, D. C. Rice, and J. F. Truelov

Category: Medical - L