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Dr Lamb has given us a solid, serious book on applied genetics. It includes a lot of the genetics you might need to know if you are thinking of starting work with a new eukaryote and need to appreciate its genetics. It also includes some of the things you may not have realized you would need to know, for example, the average values for sperm per ejaculation from a selection of animals. The book takes the reader from a useful revision of genetic terminology through the rudiments of population genetics and on to the various approaches available for changing your organism's characteristics — and holding on to them. The book finishes quite properly with an introduction to the hard economics that must be faced by anyone intending to apply their science in the market place. So are there any minus points? Yes, but in such a wide-reaching tome there are bound to be limitations. For example, the 'new' genetics has generated some new words and it would have been useful to introduce some of these terms, such as 'paralogues' and 'orthologues'. From my own perspective as a yeast geneticist, I am all too aware that the simple rules of Saccharomyces cerevisiae genetics do not hold true in the big bad world. Out there, haploids left to their own devices might switch mating type and mate with their daughters to form diploids, rather than persisting in indefinite mitosis. Other cells might either fail to mate or to sporulate because of aberrant ploidy levels. We are not warned of this in the book. My biggest criticism is really for the publishers. There is a nice selection of colour pictures at the end but they really should have applied a little more imagination to the presentation of the rest of the material which, to be frank, is a little dull. This is partly due to the lack of colour to break up the tide of black type, and partly an apparent reluctance to use figures rather than text. It is particularly difficult to follow some of the genetic crosses when genotypes wrap around two lines. This not a difficult problem to address and many undergraduate text books do succeed in making genetics come to life with imaginative diagrams. Notwithstanding these criticisms, I shall keep the book in my office and will no doubt find it missing when I need it, having forced some hapless undergraduate or research student to face up to their failure to appreciate the scope of genetics.

heredity

The Applied Genetics of Plants, Animals, Humans and Fungi. B. C. Lamb. Imperial College Press, London. 2000. Pp. 405. Price £35.00, hardback. ISBN 1 86094 179 6.