Memoirs of the Society for Endocrinology. No. II: Cell Mechanisms in Hormone Production and Action

This book is an eclectic and of necessity more extensive than intensive survey of a wide-ranging field, conducted at a symposium of the Zoological Society of London in 1960. Sylvia Fitton Jackson admirably summarizes the fundamental features of cellular organization, with special emphasis on the structural basis of secretion. Her skepticism with regard to the Golgi body as a site of production of secretion granules is particularly interesting. L. Weiss discusses current (and partly at least ephemeral) concepts of the plasma membrane. Genetic effects on hormone synthesis are treated in W. R. Trotter's brief summary of thyroidal metabolic aberrations. Two of these, Pendred's syndrome (goiter combined with high-tone deafness) and deficient iodotyrosine deiodinase activity, are inherited as recessively determined autosomal defects, possibly of a single gene. A. C. Allison, whose research is primarily concerned with abnormal hemoglobins, outlines the fundamental concepts of the regulation of protein synthesis by DNA via