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Title: Genes VII by Benjamin Lewin ISBN: 019879276X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $99.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75
Rating: 2
Summary: Thumbs down from a frustrated professor
Comment: Lewin's Genes series has dominated the market in Molecular Biology textbooks ... Unfortunately, its monopoly status seems to have insulated Lewin, his illustrators, and his editors from the corrective influences of a competitive market...so far.
I am in my second year of teaching from this book and I find it very frustrating. Lewin's writing style is unclear, difficult and distracting. Tangential ideas and subjects appear out of nowhere in the middle of chapters for no logical reason. As I write this, I should be preparing my lecture for Chapter 26 (Signal transduction). Why does this chapter start with a discussion of transporters? Later parts contain sentences that are almost unreadable and way too much detail about the alphabet soup of different kinases.
Although it is much better than some earlier editions, Genes VII still contains a variety of major and minor errors, including serious problems in explaining how lagging strand DNA synthesis is coordinated in the replication fork - several experts tell me that the model in figure 13.16 is simply wrong. The holoenyme does not lose one of its catalytic subunits with each cycle of Okazaki fragment synthesis. The clamp simply lets go and the clamp loader grabs the next fragment with a new clamp. I realized this semester that I had been ignoring the book and teaching what I knew from seminars.
Even when the content they describe is basically correct, figures in Genes VII can be astonishingly bad. Homologous recombination is illustrated with DNA strands that are only color coded and where the 5' and 3' ends are not labeled (Chapter 14). Unlabeled spliceosomal proteins change their color codes in the middle of the pathway - transesterification to form the lariat also seems to change U2 into U1 (Figure 22.10).
I am hoping that one of the newer competitors for Genes VII will prove to be a suitable replacement. I am examining Robert Weaver's Molecular Biology - I like what I've read so far - and should get a review copy of T.A. Brown's Genomes soon. ...Disclaimer - I have no financial interest in the success of any of these. All of them are available on Amazon.
By the way, I do have a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology. I'm not an expert in all of the material covered by Genes VII, but I was trained in labs whose work is cited in Genes VII.
Rating: 4
Summary: It's earned a spot on my bookshelf
Comment: Although many of my college textbooks have been packed away into neat little boxes and shoved into an attic, this one sits on my shelf and will be called into duty in the future. In an ideal world, the author would have written just for me: reordered the chapters, gone into greater detail for some topics and less for others, and inserted images that pertained to the level of detail I needed. However, the world isn't ideal. The book comes as close as any text can to meeting the needs of readers who need the book as a fundamental learning aid and as a reference guide. However, although it's jam-packed with information, it's a little tedious reading through the elementary text to get to what you need. Perhaps he needs to split the book into two texts: an Introductory Genes (Green Genes?) and an advanced text. Overall, worth the money.
Rating: 4
Summary: Cell, Genes, and others
Comment: Maybe there are lots of references from Cell because it is one of the top journals in the field of molecular biology. I've learned a great deal from the excellent review articles in Cell and from the Genes series. In lab we use this book as a quick reference before heading to pubmed to try to find review articles on an unfamiliar subject. I can't speak as to how this book can be used in the classroom.
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Title: Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts, Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, Peter Walter ISBN: 0815332181 Publisher: Garland Pub Pub. Date: 2002 List Price(USD): $105.00 |
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Title: Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual (3-Volume Set) by Joseph Sambrook, David W. Russell, Joe Sambrook ISBN: 0879695773 Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Pub. Date: 15 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $205.00 |
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Title: Genomes by Terence A. Brown ISBN: 0471250465 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 15 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $97.50 |
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Title: Molecular Cell Biology by Harvey Lodish, Arnold Berk, S. Lawrence Zipursky, Paul Matsudaira, David Baltimore, James Darnell, Lawrence Zipursky ISBN: 071673706X Publisher: W H Freeman & Co. Pub. Date: 1999 List Price(USD): $120.00 |
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Title: Molecular Biology of the Cell: The Problems Book by John Wilson, Tim Hunt ISBN: 0815316216 Publisher: Garland Pub Pub. Date: 1994 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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