Customer Reviews

Ion Channels and Disease

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This is a fantastic book for anybody interested in ion channels or molecular medicine. If you happen to be a graduate student preparing for an exam in the field - this is your salvation! Personally, I read it with enormous delight. What a great compendium of this fascinating, quickly growing field! The style is very elegant, everything is lucid, the concepts come through crystal-clear. This was certainly an enormous amount of work and the book will be helpful to many in the field - for brushing up on channels that you don't work on, for checking things quickly, for teaching, and just for fun!

Blanche Schwappach, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, San Francisco

This is a lucid discussion of the role of ion channels in disease. It begins with a wonderful introduction to molecular biology and physiology of ion channels suitable for neophyte as well as the seasoned investigator. Then individual ion and ligand gated channels are discussed in individual chapters. After the basic properties of each channel are introduced, diseases of the channels are discussed.

The author has a splendid writing gift, and she has produced a broad and wonderfully clear survey of the state of the art in this vigorous field. For a detailed summary of what you will find in the book, check the editorial review (above) from the New England Journal of Medicine.

It seems to me the book might well be read in the context of two other important books in this field: One is Bertil Hille's classic, "Ionic Channels of Excitable Membranes." As a science gathers momentum (and this one is certainly surging) we tend to lose track of what is known and what is simply assumed. Hille's book will fill in some blanks at the fundamental level - and show you exactly where the underlying assumptions are in this science. If you are at all skeptical, and of course you should be, you will like Hille's calm precision and care.

The other background book is Spikes, by Rieke et al. The implication of Spikes is that Adrian was wrong and that, therefore, all of us have been wrong about what nerves actually do - and wrong since 1926. The authors put this rather more diplomatically than I have, but there it is: Adrian wrong.

Spikes summarize evidence accumulated since about 1993 that a single nerve impulse, all by itself, can somehow convey information to the brain. This shocking news will have to be either explained or explained away in terms of the biochemical machinery of the neuron. The current explanation (which is based on precise arrival timing) would seem to rely upon the physiological equivalent of a quartz crystal, um, a device we don't often come across in biochemistry.

It would be my guess that a better understanding of ion channels will point to a more biologically realistic solution. And a new and better picture of how the neuron works.

Ion Channels and Disease is the most current and broadest survey of the subject. The key to the problem is probably in here somewhere, or is referenced here, and is waiting to be discovered. I would pay particular attention to any type of evidence for linkage, structure or signaling between "individual" channels. Linkage between discrete trans-membrane ion channels could create a longitudinal channel running the length of the nerve, probably many of them. A multi-channel axon - a cable rather than a wire -- would be one possible solution to the new mystery of how a single impulse can be freighted with graded information.

A much needed textbook is now available for all neurologist and neuroscientist doing experiments in this field.

This is really a landmark achievment to write such a good book in such a way, understandable .