This survey of human inherited metabolic abnormalities, originally published in 1959, was a worthy successor to A. E. Garrod's classic Inborn Errors of Metabolism. An enormous amount of knowledge on this subject had been accumulated in the intermittent period and Professor Harris presents an account that at the time was both precise and concise, as well as being highly readable. The study of human biochemical genetics in 1959 involved material that came from a number of disciplines, of which medicine, genetics, biochemistry, chemical pathology and anthropology were the chief. This book aimed to help direct the attention of investigators in each of these subjects to the results, and the implications of the results, obtained by those working in others. It also attempted to indicate the bearing and significance of these results on what was one of the most fundamental problems in biology, namely the mode of action of the hereditary units - the genes of classical genetics
