Chronobiology: Biological Timekeeping

作者：Kurt Benirschke · 发表于：Journal of Heredity · 年份：2004 · DOI：10.1093/jhered/esh004 · 被引用次数：39 · 研究领域：Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies

J. C. Dunlap, J. J. Loros, and P. J. DeCoursey, Editors. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Massachusetts. 2004. This large book is the ultimate result of a conference held at Dartmouth in 2001. It is superbly edited, richly illustrated, and in 11 chapters, it comprises the presentations by experts in this interesting field. Of the many books I get to read, this has been the most rewarding and I cannot stress enough how much future readers would be rewarded by acquiring this fascinating volume. What is time? DeCoursey sets the stage by reviewing the origin of human timekeeping and the emergence of chronobiology as a discipline in the last century. The “Zeitgedächtnis” has long been a puzzle to scientists, but it was not until less than 100 years ago that substantial progress began by the creation of the discipline “chronobiology.” The two principal protagonists of this effort, Pittendrigh and Aschoff, are given appropriate attention not only in the first chapter, but throughout the book. The volume provides a marvelous overview of the evolution of thinking about biological regulation of rhythms. The general terminology used in this discipline, such as “free-running,” “circadian rhythm,” “pacemaker,” “Zeitgeber,” etc., are introduced. Each chapter concludes with a concise summary and a series of challenging “study questions” that are useful to focus one's mind on the topics that have been discussed in such great detail.