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I m m u n e Intervention Volume 1 N e w Trends in Vaccines

1

edited by Ivan M. Roitt, Academic Press, 1985. $2Z50/£19.00 (xi + 145 pages) ISBN 0 12 593301 0

Immune Intervention, Volume 1, New Trends in Vaccines, is a timely book. Not only has biotechnology provided the power to produce a virtually unlimited number of new and less toxic vaccines, but W H O has called for

'health fo r all by the year 2000', UNICEF has launched the Children's Revolution and a collaborative venture has been initiated by the Rockefeller Foundation, W H O , UNICEF, UNDP and the World Bank to immunize all the world's children. Thus, a powerful feedback loop has been provided between the biotechnology revolution and the children's revolution - both to produce new vaccines and to use them.

The first chapter of the book is an example of British understatement being entitled Vaccines: Still Needed, but it contains an epigram by Geoffrey Edsall which is worth noting, ' Never in the history of human progress has a better and cheaper method of preventing illness been developed than

Immunology Today, vol. 6, No. 12, 1985

immunization at its best'. The other chapters entitled Attenuation, Gene Cloning in Vaccine Research, Syn= thetic Vaccines and Idiotype Vaccines cover most of the major advances in this rapidly moving field with only a small degree of overlap.

It should be noted that the latest refer- ences in three of the chapters are 1983 and in two are 1982. Nevertheless, this good book fills an important niche in a very rapidly moving field which is of great consequence for ' the well-being of mankind throughout the world'. [ ]

KENNETH S. WARREN

Director, Health Sciences, The Rockefeller Foundation, New York, N. Y., USA.

Perspectives in Immunogenetics and Histocompatibility Volume 6: Lymphocyte Surface Antigens 1984

edited by Eugene R. Heise, American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics, 1984. (xv + 340pages) ISBN 0 89459 235 1

Lymphocyte Surface Antigens - 1984 is a series of chapters written by the speakers at symposia at the Tenth Annual Scien- tific Meeting of the American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogene- tics. It consists of 18 chapters which deal with 5 major topics. The stated purpose is to 'examine the newer methodologies which have greatly increased our under- standing of membrane glycoproteins expressed on normal lymphocytes and their abnormal counterparts on leukemia cells'. ASHI consists of members of a diversity of backgrounds ranging from clinical laboratory technologists involved in day-tO-day tissue typing to experts in the production and characterization of monoclonal anti- bodies, to professional molecular bio- logists interested in MI--IC gene organ- ization. As might be imagined, this diversity produces extraordinarily diverse symposia with the resulting chapters being equivalently diverse. The

book tries to provide something for everybody, and it does so at the expense of providing anything of substance for anyone.

The chapters include detailed proto- cols on immunoprecipitation analysis for western blotting and solid phase radio- immunoassays and biosynthetic label- ling by Brodsky. Brodsky also provides an excellent review of the rationale behind these analyses and how these approaches can be used. Much of this is repeated in Goyert's chapter.

Additionally various strategies are presented for production of monoclonal antibodies including a superficial chapter by Hammerling on the pro- duction of human monoclonal anti- bodies. Similar greatly detailed strat- egies for using fluorescene activated cell sorters are presented as are strategies for producing useful cDNAs or genomic subclones. The use of such probes to study restriction fragment length poly- morphisms is described. It is unfortunate in this book that we are presented several times with each of these basic ap- proaches. For example, immunoprecipi- tations are presented in Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Basic molecular strategies are presented in Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. Catalogs of antigen are presented later, both in the International Workshop Analysis and in Chapters 9, 10, 16, 17 and 18. Each presents one paragraph on each of multiple monoclonal antibodies

used to define T and B cell subsets. For example, CDI(T6) is described in Chapters 9, 11 and 12.

Thus the quality of some of the chapters is excellent. Chapter 1 is particularly good for an expert in M H C class I genes trying to understand how the new molecular biologic data impinges on the classical view of M H C structure and function. In contrast Chapters 11, 17 and 18 consist of largely superficially treated repetitious material.

All in all this is not a very successful book. It doesn't provide adequate material at an appropriate level to edu- cate a technologist in current directions and current rationales of the molecular impacts of immunology nor does it contain sufficiently detailed material in sufficiently new areas for the specialists in the immunogenetics of the M H C to maintain interest. It fails to give enough background to be useful for a new gradu- ate student trying to "delve into the area for the first time and it is not sufficiently general for an interested nonspecialist reader. It suffers greatly from 18 different authors' styles and obviously 18 different views of their charge.

~_J

JEFFREY A. FRELINGER

Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, USA.