Heart development, state of the art and the new century: Heart Development edited by Richard P. Harvey and Nadia Rosenthal

Academic Press, 1998. $159.95 hbk (530 pages)ISBN 0 123 29860 1This is a beautiful book with outstanding graphics and photographic reproductions. It’s almost worth having it just for the pictures. The book covers the main events of cardiovascular development, from early differentiation, to morphogenesis, left–right asymmetry and vascular development. Several chapters are dedicated to gene families that play a role in heart development. The authors deal with topics in depth and there is only very limited, but inevitable, overlap between chapters. Tucked at the end, almost so as to avoid cross-contamination with the other topics, are three chapters illustrating some examples of human cardiac development defects. As up-to-date as a book about a fast-moving field can be, this compendium is overall clearly written and should be useful to both neophytes and experts. An introductory chapter, providing a view of the whole picture, with indication of where the various types of heart defects in humans and animal models are thought to fit, would have been helpful.Human genetics data provide the most convincing evidence that the mutation of many genes might affect the normal cardiovascular development. A quick search of the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man database (www3.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Omim/) will reveal hundreds of relevant entries. It is also clear that a given heart defect can be associated with different diseases or mutations of different genes. The clinical diagnosis of a heart defect is a picture of the end-product of an abnormal process, and is the result of the reaction and/or adaptation (including hemodynamic factors) of the organism to the primary embryological defect. Such reactions and/or adaptations are presumably under genetic control and influenced by the environment. The action of these factors will have variable results, as illustrated by the incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity of the heart phenotype in many human diseases and mouse mutants. One might think about heart development as the archetypal biomedical problem that should be addressed across species and using many different experimental strategies. This is the kind of problem that should benefit greatly from genomics and the wealth of emerging tools enabling efficient multi-gene analyses. Examples of these are gene-array expression studies, large-scale mutagenesis screenings and chromosome engineering.Disappointingly, genetics and genomics do not play a dominant role in this book. The lion’s share belongs to classic molecular biology, with a powerful touch of embryology. And yet, it comes out clearly that this development is so genetically complex that understanding it one protein at a time is an improbable task. Gene–gene interactions and gene–environment interactions are critical issues that will keep the heart-development community busy for many years to come.Those who were waiting for a book that would take this field into the next century might need to wait longer. Nevertheless, I see this as a beautiful summary of the extraordinary work accomplished in the latter part of this century. Scientists growing in the age of global genetic information should take this field from here and develop it using the new tools at our disposal.