Arterial chemoreceptors

This is a collection of papers presented to the 1993 meeting of the International Society for Arterial Chemoreceptors (ISAC) together with invited review chapters intended to provide a comprehensive account of arterial chemoreceptors from cell to system. The purpose of this book is to provide an integrated, comprehensive, up-to-date account of the progress in the field of arterial chemoreceptors. This is an ambitious but worthy objective, which if met, would bring newcomers up-to-date and inform those already in the field of recent progress. The question as to whether the objective is met has to be considered separately for the invited review articles and the papers presented by the meeting participants. The contributed papers are one to two pages each and contain one slide or table, i.e., about what might be presented in a 10-minute talk. It is likely that, together with the ensuing discussion, they provided a real contribution to the assembled audience. However, they fail to meet the objective of being comprehensive. The invited reviews, although uneven in quality, are at least somewhat comprehensive. Few papers written in the 1990s are cited, thus it is unlikely that the criteria of being up-to-date has been met. This book is intended for the active investigator in biological fields touching on chemoreceptors. There are no clinical aspects. Specialties include zoology, pharmacology, physiology, anatomy, and medicine. The illustrations, consisting of tracings and plots and tables of data, are of reasonable quality. There are few illustrations of mechanism schemes that are conducive to integration. Most references are to work done in the 1980s; few are to work done in the 1990s. Thevolume has an adequate table of contents. There is no author index. The subject index is barely adequate. This book would be of value to a participant of the ISAC meeting as a reminder of work presented. The cursory nature of the contributed papers makes them of limited value for anyone attempting to survey the field. The invited reviews are dated. Libraries already subscribing to the series would probably add this volume. It would have a limited value to bookstores.