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I've stopped recommending Alberts. It's a great cartoon guide to a mythical average eukaryotic cell, but it abstracts much farther than the data can bear and le
by madhadron 9y ago
I've stopped recommending Alberts. It's a great cartoon guide to a mythical average eukaryotic cell, but it abstracts much farther than the data can bear and leaves the reader without the intellectual tools to work with the material in it. And so you get computer scientists thinking about assembly language and compiling and physicists building little stochastic models of state transitions without knowing the biological considerations that lead those efforts astray.
Not that I have a book to recommend instead...
- entee 9y agoI disagree, it's a decent overview that introduces the major concepts and how they work. It's not intended to be at the cutting edge or to provide all caveats. By definition all textbooks in biochemistry, biology and the like are out of date by the time they go to press. The average MBOC provides is enough of a basic understanding of molecular biology to move on to more advanced work including papers that start to get into the nitty gritty details. Note that many people haven't been even exposed to the basics!
- madhadron 9y agoI'm not worried about it being out of date. I worry about the misconceptions it leaves in the minds of those who learn from it. They can parrot the words, but the mental models that result from studying it regularly lead people astray. At least, that's my anecdotal observation from as a research biologist.
- collyw 9y agoWow that's a blast from the past. I started a Molecular Biology undergrad in 1992 and that was one of the books we had to buy. Mr Alberts must be doing alight if that is a course text on many courses for so many years.