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ADVANCES IN CLINICAL CHEMISTRY VOLUME 6 This Page Intentionally Left Blank Advances in CLINICAL CHEMISTRY Edited by HARRY SOBOTKA Department o f Chemistry, M o u n t Sinai Hospital N e w York, N e w York C. P. STEWART Department of Clinical Chemistry, University of Edinburgh; Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, Scotland VOLUME 6 1963 ACADEMIC PRESS NEW Y O R K AND LON D ON COPYRIGHT @ 1983, BY ACADEMIC PRESSINC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED I N ANY FORM BY PHOTOSTAT, MICROFILM, OR ANY OTHER MEANS, WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PUBLISHERS ACADEMIC PRESS INC. 111 FIFTHAVENUE NEW Yo= 3, N. Y. United Kingdom Edition Published by ACADEMIC PRESS INC. (LONDON)Lm. BERKELEY SQUARE HOUSE, LONDONW. 1 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 58-12341 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 6 POULASTRUP,Department of Clinical Chemisty,Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark S. C. FRAZER, Department of Chemical Pathology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland ALFREDH . FREE,Ames Research Laboratory, Elkhurt, Indiana TITUSH . J . HUISMAN, Departments of Biochemistry and Pathology, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, Georgia 0. SIGGAARD-ANDERSEN, Department of Clinical Chemisty,Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark C. P. STEWART, Department of Clinical Chemistry, University of Edinburgh; Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, Scotland L. I. WOOLF, M . R. C. External Scientific Staff, Department of the Regius Professor of Medicine, Radclifle Infirmary, Oxford, England V This Page Intentionally Left Blank F O R E W O R D TO THE SERIES A historian of science in years to come may well be astonished at the explosive burst of scientific activity round about the middle of the twentieth century of our era. He will be puzzled by the interrelationship between the growth of population and the rise of the standard of living; he will be interested in the increased percentage of scientists among the population, their greater specialization and the resulting fragmentation of science; he will analyze the economic and the psychological motivation of scientists; he will compare the progress of knowledge with the broadness of the current of scientific publication. Living as we do in the midst of these events, we are hardly aware of their relatively rapid rate. What we notice is a doubling of the scientific output every ten years, regardless of contemporary political events. It is this climate which has engendered the appearance of series of reviews in dozens of disciplines. It may be with yearning or with a feeling of superiority, that we look back at such annual compendia as “Maly’s Jahresberichte der Thierchemie” of one hundred years ago, which encompassed the annual progress in the zoological half of biochemistry within 300 to 400 pages. Nowadays, that number of pages would not suffice to record the complete annual increment of knowledge in a single specialized division of the subject such as Clinical Chemistry. Media already existing furnish a comprehensive list of publications and an encyclopedic summarization of their contents; the present series of “Advances in Clinical Chemistry”like other “Advances” series-attempts something different. Its aim is to provide a readable account of selected important developments, of their roots in the allied fundamental disciplines, and of their impact upon the progress of medical science. The articles will be written by experts who are actually working in the field which they describe; they will be objectively critical discussions and not mere annotated bibliographies; and the presentation of the subjects will be unbiased as the utterances of scientists are expected to be-sine iru et studio. The bi