Annual Review of Biochemistry 1956 [antikvár]

PREFACE The Editorial Committee of this Review meets annually to select the topics and the authors for the volume to be published two years later. In the good old days of 20 years ago the selection of topics was not difficult. It was an accepted fact that the subject matter of biochemistry could be divided into discrete clusters of facts. Each cluster would grow larger from year to year, it would bulge and it would swell, but it need not necessarily divide into daughter clusters, nor need neighboring clusters fuse and rearrange. Proteins need not be confused with peptides; lipide metabolism need not spill over into carbohydrate metabolism; vitamins, enzymes, and hormones could be kept in separate packages; and so on. This has been a useful practical hypothesis which has long enjoyed a tongue-in-cheek acceptance. It has permitted departments of biochemistry in medical schools to adhere to substantially the same lecture and laboratory topics the world over; and it has permitted textbooks to grow larger and the chapter headings to remain the same. Within this Review acceptance of the same philosophy was almost inescapable. Indeed, in the preface to Volume 3 (1954) we referred to topics "which by universal consent constitute the traditional divisions of the subject," topics which "will continue to receive review at annual or biennial intervals." Our faithful adherence to so simple a policy has been shaken by the dramatic growth of the whole corpus of biochemistry and by the turmoil within. With the founding of other Reviews we have attempted to cut things back to size by the transfer to several sister volumes of topics that seemed more properly oriented toward physiology, microbiology, and plánt physiology. But the truncated residue continues to grow and constantly taxes the best efforts of our authors to keep it within their compass. We devote more space to vitamins only to find that proteins, peptides, enzyme systems, protein biosynthesis, nucleic acids, and nucleotides are equally in need of more and more pages in the Review. Lipide metabolism, carbohydrate metabolism, and indeed, several groups of metabolic systems can no longer be kept discretely apart: one-carbon and two-carbon biochemistry has interpenetrated the entire metabolic framework. It is this restless dynamic character of the subject that helps to bedevil the author, to tax his ingenuity, and to create demands upon him that can hardly be met. No longer is it easy to define with precision the boundaries of an assigned topic, to keep a review within the allocated space, or to encompass more than a fraction of the pertinent literature. Many papers are necessarily omitted because of the exigencies of space, because of the plausible assumption that another author may find them to be of greater relevance to his own topic, and because of the insistence of the editors that the reviews shall be critical appraisals and not synoptic summaries.