This book is a collection of papers based on presentations at a September 1988 NATO Workshop in Belgium, organized by Albert Goldbeter with J. Rinzel and L. A. Segel. The book contains examples of cellular communication in neural, hormonal, immunological, cardiac and developmental biology. The mixture of experiment and theory, as suggested by the subtitle, is mostly successful. The volume has an excellent introduction by the editor, in which common themes, common methods, and motivation are clearly imparted. Several (somewhat whimsical but appealing) pieces of artwork have been included in the text, as a metaphor for spirals in nature, a subtheme in several of the papers and this makes for a nice opening to the book.
The first section of this book, titled "From neural cells to neural networks", contains articles by R. R. Llinas on intrinsic rhythm in central neurons and by J. L. Hindmarsh and R. M. Rose on a model for a "thalamic neuron". Certain terminology used here causes confusion. For example, a "narrow channel property" denotes a phase-plane configuration, not a property of membrane channels. The special properties of "thalamic" rather than generic neurons are not mentioned. Similar usage of undefined technical terms recurs in other contributions.
Several papers on bursting behaviour in Part 1 include those of W. D. Adams and J. A. Benson (reviewing bursting neurons in invertebrates and vertebrates), of A. Sherman and J. Rinzel (on the collective properties of insulin secreting cells), and S. Grillner et al. (on the lamprey spinal preparation that has a burst-generating network). These give a good set of complementary examples of a single phenomenon. Also included in this section is paper by H. Parnas and I. Parnas on neurotransmitter release, a summary by G. B. Ermentrout and N. Kopell of their work on chains of oscillators applied to the properties of central pattern generators, a paper by Y. Dudai on molecular mechanisms underlying learning, and a paper by J. Demongeot et al. about neural networks.
Many of these papers are interesting on their own. As a collection under a single topic heading, the mixture is rather heterogeneous, containing a diversity of themes, techniques, mathematical language and level of detail.