Garrod's Inborn Errors of Metabolism. Reprinted with a Supplement.

Frontispiece, xi, 207 pp, 1 leaf. Original cloth, large 8vo. Very Good, in dust jacket. Reprints Garrod's 1909 book Inborn Errors of Metabolism, as well as part of a 1902 paper by Garrod on alkaptonuria ('The Incidence of Alkaptonuria: A Study in Chemical Individuality'). Includes a bibliography of Garrod's writings. Garrison-Morton 244.1 and 3921 (citing 1st ed., 1909). 'Garrod saw . that Mendel's laws of inheritance . provided an explanation of the puzzling phenomenon of alkaptonuria. The mating of first cousins created the conditions that enabled a rare, recessive character to appear. Garrod found that some twelve alkaptonuric children, . all resulting from the marriages of first cousins, had a total of thirty-six normal siblings--a ratio of three normal children to one alkaptonuric in families containing alkaptonurics. Such a perfect 3:1 Mendelian ratio showed that alkaptonuria was inherited as a simple Mendelian recessive factor. . In June 1908 Garrod delivered the Croonian Lectures . on the various metabolic anomalies he had studied and published them as a book entitled Inborn Errors of Metabolism [reprinted here]. By 1908 he was able to suggest that the anomaly in alkaptonuria derived from the lack of a specific enzyme that catalyzed a specific chemical change within living tissue. The lack of such an enzyme would result in the accumulation of an intermediate substance that would then be excreted. . Since the inborn error was inherited and caused by a specifc Mendelian factor. ., Garrod was introducing a link between a specific enzyme and a specific gene. He thus foreshadowed the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis that in the 1940's would be developed so effectively by George Wells Beadle and Edward L. Tatum . and that has been central to the development of theories of gene action' (D.S.B. 17: 334-35).…