J. Wilson – Molecular Biology of the Cell. The Problems Book (6th edition)

Описание

Welcome to The Problems Book, which aims to help students appreciate the ways
in which an understanding of how cells work, as discussed in Molecular Biology
of the Cell, Sixth Edition, by Alberts et al., can be further explored through experiments
and simple calculations. As always, we hope to stimulate our readers to
ask questions as well as to learn and digest the stories that “the big book” tells. In
real life, knowledge and understanding come from research, which entails curiosity,
puzzlement, doubt, criticism, and debate as well as performing experiments.
Groping one’s way through the fog of uncertainty during a project is a slow and
often discouraging process; eureka moments (even if one is lucky) are few and far
between. Nevertheless, those moments catch the essence of the drama, and we
have tended to focus on them, where we have been able to cast them in the form
of a problem. In this way, for student and teacher alike, we hope to encourage a
questioning attitude to biology. Without curiosity there would be neither science
nor scientists.
We have been making up problems together since 1985, and the revision leading
to this new edition of The Problems Book has taken us more than four years.
There are several new things about this edition. First, the book is now in color. As
well as improving its look as a whole, we think this will improve the clarity and
intelligibility of the figures. Second, we’ve added a new type of question, MCAT
Style, modeled on the kind of problems that are found in most medical school
admissions tests. These were drafted by Doug Kellogg at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, and we think they make a great addition to the book. Indeed,
we were pleasantly surprised to discover that these questions allowed us to frame
problems in new and interesting ways. Elsewhere, we have done a considerable
amount of pruning, partly to make space for these new problems and partly to
eliminate problems that were showing their age or were no longer relevant to the
parent text.
The organization of The Problems Book remains largely the same. There are
Terms to Learn, Definitions, and True/False sections in every chapter. Next come
Thought Problems, of which some are more challenging than others—they may
be playful, or serious, but all are designed to make the reader think. Following
these is a section called Calculations, designed to deal with quantitative aspects
of cell biology. The calculations in this book are mostly very straightforward, usually
involving no more than the interconversion of units, yet they provide a solid
framework for thinking about the cell. Are cell-surface receptors sparse in the
plasma membrane, or jam-packed? Do molecules diffuse across a cell slowly, or
in the blink of an eye? Does chromatin occupy most of the nuclear volume, or
just a tiny fraction? How fast could a tomato plant grow, theoretically? Numerical
analysis of such questions is very important if one is to gain an understanding
for the molecular basis of cell biology. The Data Handling section contains
research-based problems. Our original brief was to compose problems based on
experiments so as to allow readers to get a better feel for the way in which biological
knowledge is obtained. It is tremendously important to keep asking, “How do
we know that? What’s the evidence?” or to wonder how one might go about finding
something out. Often it’s not at all obvious, often the initial breakthrough was
a lucky chance observation, made while investigating some completely different business. In fact, it takes most of us years of research experience to grasp the idea
of how one simple fact “can illuminate a distant area, hitherto dark” (Boveri,
1902). Seeing how these tiny shards of evidence give rise to the big picture often
involves considerable imagination as well as a certain discipline, to know how
much weight the evidence will bear. We hope we have sometimes, at least, been
able to capture the essence of how experiments lead to understanding. To do
justice to the authors of the experiments we use in these problems, however, we
strongly recommend recourse to the original papers, whose references we always
provide.
A newly compiled section, Medical Links, contains problems of particular
interest to health science students.
We hope that the organization and classification of problems will help both
student and teacher to find what they are looking for. How should this book be
used? We composed it by a process of constant dialogue and discussion, and we
suspect that the most fruitful use of the problems will be to stimulate discussions
in class, or between students. Tackling selected problems as homework will also
surely help. Teachers have told us that they find ideas for exam questions here,
and all the answers to our questions are now provided in The Problems Book, for
many of these problems are difficult to answer and are not intended to be set as
tests. Rather, we hope that readers will be intrigued (as we were) by the questions
we ask, and after thinking a bit will want to see what the answer is, what form the
discussion takes, and how to get at thinking about this particular kind of a problem.
The answers to the end-of-chapter problems in Molecular Biology of the Cell,
Sixth Edition can also be found in the back of this book, including the answers to
newly written problems for Chapters 21 through 24.
As always, we want to hear from our readers, for despite our best efforts, we do
not always get things right. Please email John Wilson at jwilson@bcm.edu or Tim
Hunt at tim.hunt@cancer.org.uk with your comments or queries, and we’ll do our
best to answer them.