Microbial Physiology By Albert G. Moat (Marshall University School of Medicine, West Virginia) and John W. Foster (University of Alabama School of Medicine). Wiley:  New York. 1995. xv + 580 pp. $59.95. ISBN 0-471-01452-4.

Abstract

This book is the edited proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Ceramics in Medicine, held in Florida in November 1995. This work contains the latest research on the increasingly important and wide-ranging role of bioceramics in medicine. This volume will be a vital reference document for academic and industrial researchers in the field, and it will also be of great value to students and lecturers in materials science, medical engineering, and clinical implantology. There are 85 papers divided into the following sections: Bone Biology, Spinal Reconstruction, Orthopaedic Applications, ENT and Maxillofacial, Dental Applications, Calcium Phosphate Coatings, New Directions, Composites, and Bioactive Glasses. There are an author index and a subject index. JA965604A S0002-7863(96)05604-1 Concepts in Chemistry: A Contemporary Challenge. Edited by Dennis H. Rouvray (University of Georgia). Wiley: New York. 1997. xvi + 420 pp. $79.95. ISBN 0-471-96555-3.This volume of twelve essay reviews is largely based on lectures originally presented as part of the conference Are the Concepts of Chemistry all Fuzzy?, held in Pitlochry, Scotland, in July of 1995, and organized by Dennis Rouvray and Edward Kirby under the sponsorship of the International Society for Mathematical Chemistry. The range of topics includes the fuzziness of chemical concepts; the role of mathematics in chemistry; the concepts of periodicity and hyperperiodicity; the concept of chemical structure; electron-counting rules and topology in carbon allotropes, inorganic clusters, and superconductors (three essays); the concept of ring currents; the concepts of symmetry and chirality (two essays); the concept of complexity; and the concept of epitopes and paratopes in immunological reactions.In keeping with both the title of the original conference and the editor's comments in the preface, one might expect each essay to focus on an analysis of the "fuzziness" of a key chemical concept using the paradigm of fuzzy logic theory. However, as is usually the case with volumes based on symposia, the various authors often wander far from the organizers' original intention. Indeed, a measure of just how much wandering has occurred can be gaged from the fact that the term "fuzzy" and its various derivatives (fuzzified, fuzziness, etc.) appear only 13 times in the index, and that nine of these references are to the editor's own paper.In any analysis of the precision or fuzziness of a concept, one would reasonably expect the author to trace the history of the concept, documenting both its origins and historical permutations; to document the extent of its current fuzziness by citing examples of variable usage in the modern literature; to cite specific examples in which application of the concept leads to ambiguity; and, lastly, to suggest ways of making its meaning more precise. All of this assumes, of course, that the author has selected an important general chemical concept for analysis in the first place. Very few of the essays in this volume meet all five of these ...