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~ O O K H~EVIEWS

~ ~ t D~cussion and development

Postimplantation Development in the Mouse (ClBA Foundation Symposia 165) edited by D.J. Chadwick and J. Marsh John Wiley & Sons, 1992. £42.50 (x + 315 pages) ISBN 0 471 93384 8

Some scientists hate attending conferences. I am not one of them. A couple of times a year I like nothing better than sitting around eating, drinking and talking about science with a small (but not too small) group of diverse (but not too diverse) colleagues. But what value do the proceedings have when written up as a book? Whilst meetings are great places to find out about what is going on, is a published version of the meeting an equally good way of keeping up to date? Sadly, in general the answer is no. A year after the event, the flames have usually died, and no amount of poking will restore life to the embers. Those who attended will either write up a summary of what has already been published, or they will write up a sideline, which may be of interest only to specialists. In these days of rapid review publications, such as the one you are reading, a brief year-old review is not a useful item.

So much for the principles." What of the particulars of this volume? Well it looks like it was a great meeting. The papers describe mouse development in a way that really emphasizes the parallels

with Drosophila. They begin with establishment of the anterior-posterior axis and the primary germ layers and proceed through segmentation of the brain and somites, ending up with a little organogenesis and a look at the use of embryonic stem cells. As expected, some papers are comprehensive and scholarly, in particular those by Kirsty Lawson and Patrick Tam on cell fate, and Rosa Beddington's beautiful colour exploded- view diagrams of gastmlation; other authors have (understandably) been briefer in their reviews.

There is one feature of the CIBA Foundation Symposia that I think is excellent: the publication of the discussions that follow each talk (after editing by the participants). I must confess that it was these sections of the book that I always raced ahead to read. Having at least a passing acquaintance with almost every participant, I could see the characters of each coming through in their comments and ripostes. A good part of the business of a meeting is done over

coffee, lunch or beer. Since we can't have a transcript of what went on in the restaurants and bars, then the full text of the discussion is next best. It is also fairly comprehensible, I would say, even for the only partially initiated, although you would have to be conversant with what a Pax gene is, why you'd want to make a chimaeric embryo with a tetraploid blastocyst and what a protein is doing making a helix-loop-helix interaction with El2.

I couldn't honestly recommend anyone to spend their own money on this book. Some libraries must take the whole series of CIBA Symposia, and they will continue, I guess, until financially squeezed. If you want to spend an interesting hour in one of those libraries skipping through the discussions, that would not be time wasted.

Just one more thing. If we can't have transcripts of the bar discussions, how about some photographs?

Ian J. Jackson

MRC Human Genetics Unit, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, UK EH4 2XU.

Inexpensive wax for PCR protocols - a warning In last month 's T/G (vol. 8, no. 9, p. 301) we described the use of inexpens- ive pastillated paraffin wax for separating DNA from the rest of the PCR reaction mixture during initial high temperature denaturation of the DNA. We have recently experienced inhibition of PCR reaction with some batches of Taq polymerase when we used the material described. It seems to be necessary to check the enzyme on a batch-by-batch basis. Howard Cooke, MRC Human Genetics Unit, Western General Hospital, Crewe Road, Edinburgh, UK EH4 2XU.

"FIG OCTOBER 1992 VOL. 8 NO. 10