Customer Reviews:
 My go to MCB book February 1, 2010
Jurrasic
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I keep this one with me at all times in lab if I ever need to look up some basic mechanisms or pathways in the cell. This is my favorite Cellular biology book because it is not simplified like the Cell books.
 Thorough, shapeless compendium of molecular biology September 5, 2010
Tate Fairchild (West Chester, Pennsylvania)
Although I don't claim to be a molecular biologist, nor have I read beyond chapter 5 of Lodish's "Molecular and Cell Biology", this textbook feels admirably thorough in its treatment of its subject, bringing the reader up to date on a wide range of the detail generated in the field over the past few decades.
The book's authors, furthermore, have addressed the learning needs of their readership; once it moves into its substantive chapters, virtually all points are made simultaneously with textbook prose and colorful, graphic illustrations which are well drawn and accompanied by excellent captions. This aspect of the book is its great strength.
There is a far more serious problem with the book, however, which explains the middling rating I have given it. Like many such textbooks, it is committee-written, which is not a problem when such books are given proper shape by a sharp editor. But the book lacks that editor and as a result dwells on the most trivial developments in its field with exactly the same weight as its bedrock components to a fault. In aiming to be comprehensive, it drowns the reader in a sea of obnoxious detail that begs the book and its authors not to be taken seriously. The book may have been conceived as a reference, but I fear that it will always be assigned chapter rather than passage at a time, as is customary in graduate school courses.
The corollary to this situation is that the first several chapters of the book describe a host of laboratory processes, each in enormous detail and overall in serial fashion, without adequately describing the use and purpose for each. The book then explains that each process will be taken up in a later chapter in conjunction with an exploration of the field in which it is mainly used. This is all fine, but does the reader really need to be held accountable for a description of these processes twice, particularly when they are presented so haphazardly initially? At least in the first five chapters, rote memorization is the only learning strategy possible for the vast majority of the material. And while there is nothing wrong with rote memorization, the unconnectedness of the material, combined with its sprawling volume, make these initial chapters virtually useless as learning tools.
I recommend this book, therefore, with a strict reservation: it should only be used by a teacher so familiar with it that he can assign "primary", "secondary", and perhaps even "tertiary" passages from it at a time, in order to help the reader build an understanding of molecular biology systematically and rationally structure his study time.
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