Product Description
The third edition of the landmark text Recombinant DNA offers an authoritative, accessible, and engaging introduction to modern, genome centered biology from its foremost practitioners. The new edition explores core concepts in molecular biology in a contemporary inquiry based context, building its coverage around the most relevant and exciting examples of current research and landmark experiments that redefined our understanding of DNA. As a result, students learn in a compelling way how working scientists make real high impact discoveries. The first chapters provide an introduction to the fundamental concepts of genetics and genomics, an inside look at the Human Genome Project, bioinformatic and experimental techniques for large scale genomic studies, and a survey of epigenetics and RNA interference. The final chapters cover the quest to identify disease causing genes, the genetic basis of cancer, and DNA fingerprinting and forensics. In these chapters the authors provide examples of practical applications in human medicine, and discuss the future of human genetics and genomics projects.
About the Author
This book will serve as an excellent source in college-level classrooms where professors and students will enjoy the straightforward approach taken by the authors to describe the basics of molecular biology. The volume is also recommended for anyone else with an interest in genes, genomes, and their applications in biotechnology, who will find the book s focused approach on the facts, experiments, and procedural outcomes very simple to follow and understand...
The authors have done a remarkable job of presenting enough information so that readers will understand a particular concept, technique, or tool without tedious discussions that may draw them away from the main points. With such a focused and highly illustrative text, readers will find this first section and the remainder of the book (which highlights specific issues in whole-genome analyses and human genomics) to be not only educational and informative, but also a pleasure to read.
The Quarterly Review of Biology

Molecular Biology of the Cell is the classic in-depth text reference in cell biology. By extracting the fundamental concepts from this enormous and ever-growing field, the authors tell the story of cell biology, and create a coherent framework through which non-expert readers may approach the subject. Written in clear and concise language, and beautifully illustrated, the book is enjoyable to read, and it provides a clear sense of the excitement of modern biology. Molecular Biology of the Cell sets forth the current understanding of cell biology (completely updated as of Autumn 2001), and it explores the intriguing implications and possibilities of the great deal that remains unknown.
The hallmark features of previous editions continue in the Fourth Edition. The book is designed with a clean and open, single-column layout. The art program maintains a completely consistent format and style, and includes over 1,600 photographs, electron micrographs, and original drawings by the authors. Clear and concise concept headings introduce each section. Every chapter contains extensive references. Most important, every chapter has been subjected to a rigorous, collaborative revision process where, in addition to incorporating comments from expert reviewers, each co-author reads and reviews the other authors' prose. The result is a truly integrated work with a single authorial voice.</P>

Few writers distinguish themselves by their ability to write about complicated, even obscure topics clearly and engagingly. In Chaos, James Gleick, a former science writer for the New York Times, shows that he resides in this exclusive category. Here he takes on the job of depicting the first years of the study of chaos--the seemingly random patterns that characterise many natural phenomena.
This is not a purely technical book. Instead, it focuses as much on the scientists studying chaos as on the chaos itself. In the pages of Gleick's book, the reader meets dozens of extraordinary and eccentric people. For instance, Mitchell Feigenbaum, who constructed and regulated his life by a 26-hour clock and watched his waking hours come in and out of phase with those of his coworkers at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
As for chaos itself, Gleick does an outstanding job of explaining the thought processes and investigative techniques that researchers bring to bear on chaos problems. Rather than attempt to explain Julia sets, Lorenz attractors and the Mandelbrot Set with gigantically complicated equations, Chaos relies on sketches, photographs and Gleick's wonderful descriptive prose. --Christine Buttery

What makes populations stabilize? What makes them fluctuate? Are populations in complex ecosystems more stable than populations in simple ecosystems? In 1973. Robert May addressed these questions in this classic book. May investigated the mathematical roots of population dynamics and argued - counter to most current biological thinking - that complex ecosystems in themselves do not lead to population stability. Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems played a key role in introducing nonlinear mathematical models and the study of deterministic chaos into ecology, a role chronicled in James Gleick's book Chaos. In the quarter century since its first publication, the book's message has grown in power. Nonlinear models are now at the center of ecological thinking, and current threats to biodiversity have made questions about the role of ecosystem complexity more crucial than ever. In a new introduction, the author addresses some of the changes that have swept biology and the biological world since the book's first publication.

The geometric shapes and natural forms, captured with exceptional precision in Ernst Haeckel's prints, still influence artists and designers to this day. This volume highlights the research and findings of this natural scientist. Powerful modern microscopes have confirmed the accuracy of Haeckel's prints, which even in their day, became world famous. Haeckel's portfolio, first published between 1899 and 1904 in separate installments, is described in the opening essays. The plates illustrate Haeckel's fundamental monistic notion of the "unity of all living things" and the wide variety of forms are executed with utmost delicacy. Incipient microscopic organisms are juxtaposed with highly developed plants and animals. The pages, ordered according to geometric and "constructive" aspects, document the oness of the world in its most diversified forms. This collection of plates was not only well-received by scientists, but by artists and architects as well. Rene Binet, a pioneer of glass and iron constructions, Emile Galle, a renowned Art Nouveau designer, and the photographer Karl Blossfeld all make explicit reference to Haeckel in their work.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a magnificent history of the gene and a response to the defining question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to “read” and “write” our own genetic information?
The extraordinary Siddhartha Mukherjee has a written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.
Throughout the narrative, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—cuts like a bright, red line, reminding us of the many questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In superb prose and with an instinct for the dramatic scene, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome.
As The New Yorker said of The Emperor of All Maladies, “It’s hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion…An extraordinary achievement.” Riveting, revelatory, and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, and an essential preparation for the moral complexity introduced by our ability to create or “write” the human genome, The Gene is a must-read for everyone concerned about the definition and future of humanity. This is the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master.

Thorough and accessible, this book presents the design principles of biological systems, and highlights the recurring circuit elements that make up biological networks. It provides a simple mathematical framework which can be used to understand and even design biological circuits. The text avoids specialist terms, focusing instead on several well-studied biological systems that concisely demonstrate key principles. "An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits" builds a solid foundation for the intuitive understanding of general principles. It encourages the reader to ask why a system is designed in a particular way and then proceeds to answer with simplified models.

进化心理学是一门革命性的新科学，它提供了一个有趣而独特的视角来观察人类的心理和行为，是现代心理学和进化生物学在理论上的真正融合。作者戴维巴斯是进化心理学领域的权威学者和领军人物，他在本书中对进化心理学这一日新月异的领域进行了全面而深入的回顾和展望。全书论述的主题是按照适应性问题来展开的，从生存挑战、择偶、抚育、亲属到群体生活的挑战，包括合作、攻击、性冲突、地位以及社会等级。各章不仅介绍必备的理论背景，而且还提供了生动具体的实例，帮助读者透彻地理解这一领域。作者的写作风格清晰简洁，轻松易读，逻辑严密，引人入胜，即便是普通读者也可以将书中学到的相关知识应用于理解自身和他人的生活。
自1999年首版以来，本书一直是进化心理学领域里程碑式的著作，是了解和学习进化心理学的必读书。最新第4版不仅增添了400余条新文献，而且增加了大量内容，包括：跨文化研究、生理学研究、遗传学和脑成像等研究方法；进化形成的导航机制理论；火和烹饪；凶杀；模仿择偶行为；男性择偶偏好对他们实际择偶行为的影响；等等。