Customer Reviews

Biomechanics at Micro- And Nanoscale Levels

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This is collection of 14 manuscripts written by Japanese scientists and distributed among the subjects "Cell Mechanics," "Cell Response to Mechanical Stimulation," "Tissue Engineering," and "Computational Biomechanics." After a few pages of reading, I quickly became frustrated by the typographical and grammatical errors prevalent in almost every manuscript. Improperly or inaccurately labeled figures, malapropisms, and obvious spelling errors all create confustion and obscure the authors' ideas. I am willing to forgive clunky English, but a simple, professional review of the papers before publishing would have corrected a lot of the errors and made the book as a whole easier to read.

As for the content, the manuscripts cover some interesting territory. The main idea that resonates through all the manuscripts and is stated in the introduction is that interactions on the micro- and nano-scale amongst cellular constituents are responsible for the wide range of observed phenomena. This idea seems reasonable, and many of the papers effectively advance the idea to some extent. However, the authors explicitly exclude the importance of the genetic code in influencing these interactions, which I find baffling. Genetics must contribute on some level! Perhaps this is just another example of an oversight in translation.

The price of this book is high considering that the book seems so hastily thrown together. I believe the book would be much more effective if the material and data in the manuscripts were collected, rewritten, and reorganized into a part-and-chapter format with consistent figures and professionally proofread English.