Fundamentals of Biochemistry: Life at the MolecularLevel (Third Edition)D. Voet, J. Voet, and C. W. Pratt, Wiley, Hoboken, 2008,1099 pp. plus Solutions to Problems, Glossary andIndex, ISBN 978-0-470-12930-2, $182.95.

As biochemistry textbooks approach the 4 kg mark,we welcome this new addition of the Voet, Voet, andPratt Fundamentals text. It is beautifully produced (as wehave come to expect), with full color and wide margins,and seems to be both up-to-date and to contain awealth of pedagogic aids to help students learn. A hugelist of ‘‘reviewers’’ is included who presumably bear(some?) responsibility for the accuracy of the text. Thereis one new chapter (on Biochemical Signaling) and manyup-dates resulting from recent discoveries since the pre-vious edition. The Preface notes that P/O have now beenupdated, or perhaps reduced, from 3.0 to 2.5!

The text is divided into five major sections each consist-ing of several chapters. The first is the Introduction andhas two chapters on ‘‘The Chemistry of Life’’ and ‘‘Water’’.The following four sections are: Biomolecules (nucleicacids, protein structure, function of some selected pro-

teins [Mb, Hb, muscle proteins, and antibodies], carbohy-drates, lipids and membranes, and membrane transport);Enzymes (catalysis, kinetics, signaling); Metabolism(starting with an overview and details of techniques, glu-cose metabolism, glycolysis, citric acid cycle, electrontransport chain, photosynthesis, lipid metabolism, aminoacid metabolism, integration [in mammalian systems]);Gene Expression and Replication (nucleotide metabolism,nucleic acid structure, replication, recombination andrepair, transcription, RNA processing, protein synthesis,regulation of gene expression). The Metabolism section isthe largest and the Gene Expression section occupiesabout a quarter of the book. The content as far as I cansee it is up-to-date and the coverage is what one wouldexpect for a major biochemistry text. I recall a meetingabout the biochemistry curriculum many years ago. An an-cient professor said: ‘‘I hope we’re not going to spend along time discussing what should be in the curriculum’’and, as he held up the then favored book (Lehninger):‘‘Biochemistry—it’s what’s in this book!’’ I’m sure the samesort of remark could now be applied to Fundamentals.

The text is not only attractively produced and illumi-nated with many color figures of molecules such as pro-teins (their PDB identifiers are given), electron- and othermicrographs, metabolic and other pathways, as well ascarefully thought out diagrams, but is also easy to read—the prose is good. The approach is strongly chemical,and although students these days seem to have an an-tipathy toward chemistry, we have to remember that thisis bio-chemistry, and that living things work by chemistry!If you really want to understand (see later) you have tounderstand the chemistry.

Each chapter has an initial summary/overview and alist of chapter contents, and there are boxes entitled‘‘Learning Objectives’’ (example: ‘‘Understand that sev-eral metabolic processes require cooperation amongorgans.’’) I am not sure what a student’s response tosuch statements containing the word understand mightbe and how their ‘‘understanding’’ might be assessed. Astudent’s possible answer might be ‘‘Yes, I do under-stand’’ (how does the assessor know?), or ‘‘I can writean essay about it’’. Understanding is a difficult conceptto measure: possibly it should have the flavor ‘‘under-stand and be able to do something with the information’’.These Learning Objectives boxes are complemented byothers entitled ‘‘Check your understanding’’, whichrequire, for example, the reader to list some items, orthey pose questions, such as ‘‘What is the significanceof dimerization of the GH receptor?’’, or ‘‘Why is ATP a‘high-energy’ compound?’’. On the whole, I thought thatitems asking the student to explain were better, forexample: ‘‘Explain how cellular ATP is replenished’’. Ask-ing student to explain is always a good way of seeing ifthey understand rather than just remember and recite, inmy experience.

At the ends of chapters there are Summaries that listkey concepts in numbered points, and there are also listsof key terms used with the page numbers where they arefirst mentioned. These are followed by Problems which

319

are quite challenging—again testing understanding—andthere are detailed answers at the end of the book. Thechapters conclude with short lists of references, manytaken from journals such as TIBS. A very attractive fea-ture for me was boxes entitled ‘‘Pathways of discovery’’,‘‘Perspectives in Biochemistry’’, and ‘‘Biochemistry inhealth and disease’’. The latter would of course make thebook interesting to medical students being ‘‘forced’’ tolearn some biochemistry presumably. Some boxes give,at some length, historical backgrounds of people andtheir discoveries such as Banting and Best, Warburg,Krebs, Watson, Crick and Franklin, to name but a few. Ifind these interesting, but some students may say ‘‘Am Ito remember this for the exam?’’! Some boxes deal withissues such as DNA fingerprinting and GFP, for example,and the ethics of recombinant DNA technology. The dis-eases dealt with in the ‘‘Disease’’ boxes are mostly whatyou would expect—porphyria, glycogen storage dis-eases, etc, but not as far as I could see mitochondrialdiseases. There are also of course ‘‘Media Resources’’associated with the book that can be accessed via theInternet as is typical of such texts these days. Theseinclude ‘‘Guided Explorations’’, ‘‘Interactive Exercises’’,‘‘Animations’’: as the blurb has it ‘‘Success in Biochemis-try . . . is just a click away’’. (What is ‘‘success’’?) Teach-ing resources for instructors are also available.

Overall this is a very impressive achievement. Textsthese days are not linear and students do not expect toread linearly, and they do expect to use the Web, so thebook should fulfill every student’s needs. There is a lot ofmaterial here—this is the Fundamentals of biochemistry,and a diligent student, working through this book and itspedagogic features in addition to attending lectures anddiscussing in small groups, would be very knowledgeableand indeed understand a lot of biochemistry, hopefullythis knowledge being capable of being put to use insome way. Poorer students might be put off by the pleth-ora of material, but could hardly fail to be intrigued andinformed by at least some parts. Even the fairly intelligentlay person or high school student would surely find somethings of interest here because the scope is so wide (andthe pictures so brilliant).

E. J. WoodCentre for Bioscience

The Higher Education AcademyUniversity of LeedsLeeds LS2 9JT, UK

E-mail: e.j.wood@leeds.ac.uk

DOI 10.1002/bmb.20198

320 BAMBED, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 316–321, 2008