© 2001 American Association for Clinical Chemistry, Inc.
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Clinical and Forensic Applications of Capillary Electrophoresis. J.R. Petersen, A.M. Mohammad, eds. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, 2001, 453 pp., $150.00. ISBN 0-89603-645-6.
Department of Science and Technology, University of Verona, Strada Le Grazie No. 15, I-37134 Verona, Italy
The overture of this opus is, perhaps, not as exciting as those of Rossini’s operas, like Guglielmo Tell or the Gazza Ladra. In the preface, the editors claim that Tiselius discussed his PhD thesis in 1937, when even school kids know that it was in 1930. They also insist that "electrophoresis was first described by Arne Tiselius", when, in fact, it was practiced soon after the jumping frog legs of Galvani and the invention of the pila by Volta (the first power supply delivering continuous electricity) in the early 1800s. There are rumors that Reuss, an officer in the Czar’s army, was caught stealing sand from the banks of the Moskva river, which he used to fill up a U-tube for doing electrophoresis. In that process, he even discovered... yes, good old electroendoosmosis (1809)! The editors also try to sell the notion that in the late 1960s, Hjertèn "described the first capillary electrophoresis apparatus". Well, Hjertèn’s achievement was a "Copernican revolution" because, in reality, he described zone electrophoresis in straight quartz tubes of 1–3 mm diameter; he had to rotate them along their axis to prevent decantation of denser macromolecular zones. This had nothing to do with capillary electrophoresis, which came much later with the introduction of polyimide-clad, fused-silica capillaries with inner diameters of 10–200 µm (i.e., capillary dimensions; 1–3 mm i.d. can hardly be called a capillary lumen). Well, on the wake of their powerful victory at the Presidential elections, these Texan editors might be able to bend history to their whims, but we poor mortals have to stick to facts.
This defocusing of the origin of ideas did not spur me to read further, but I took the challenge. What is the aim of this book? According to the editors "this book is not meant to give an in depth methodological description of the use of CE [capillary electrophoresis] in the clinical laboratory, but to give an overview of its current use". Is this aim fulfilled? It would appear not. There is no single reference to anything published in the year 2000, just a handful of 1999 citations and a little bit more from 1998; the vast majority of the references are old and perhaps outdated. This is no doubt attributable to the fact that book production takes much too long a time, typically 18 months, so that when books appear, they are already obsolete. So, if the aim is not to produce a cookbook full of recipes, a view of what is going on in the field is better given by journals, such as Electrophoresis or Analytical Chemistry, which provide at least one issue per year (or extensive reviews) dedicated to this topic, with production times of 
7 months.
What is the value of the present book for clinical laboratorians? I am afraid that my answer can be only negative. Laboratorians will not find in this book the much needed working recipes, traps to avoid, pitfalls and limitations; they will also not find here an up-to-date coverage of the field. Curiously, they will find that in other books published by Humana (Clinical Applications of Capillary Electrophoresis, S. M. Palfrey, ed., 1999, and certainly in the extensive book Practical Applications of Capillary Electrophoresis, K. R. Mitchelson, J. Cheng, eds., 2001). Perhaps Humana Press could be so "humane" as to give us a break in this useless book proliferation; after all, world-wide moratoriums could also be reached in very important problems afflicting the present-day world, such as the nuclear weapons proliferation! These senseless, paranoic "variations" on the same, obsessive theme do not make harmony, like the famous "Goldberg Variations" by Bach (as gloriously performed by Glen Gould). Instead, it forces the poor authors (not so humanely treated in terms of royalties) to perfect the art of "cut and paste" with their word processors.
Having stated that, I must confess that I enjoyed reading a few chapters, notably Chapters 7, 9, and 19 ("Lipoprotein Analysis", "Amino Acid Analysis", "Drug Analysis", respectively), and the masterly account of capillary electrophoresis mass spectrometry of proteins and peptides in Chapter 16.
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