FOREWORD 



This book will, I hope, prove a valuable technical handbook for those 

 engaged in the use of electronic techniques in biology. I think its 

 significance and value should be much more than as a guide to tech- 

 nique. It is easy for users of elaborate techniques to come to regard 

 them as tools they need not bother to understand, and the rehabihty 

 of modern apparatus is such as to encourage this attitude; it is, however, 

 a disastrous one for a scientist who interprets the results obtained and 

 who must be the master and not the slave of his technology. This 

 book enables him to remain master despite complex techniques. 



For over 25 years research students who have come to Cambridge 

 to learn electrophysiology have been made to construct with their 

 own hands elementary biological electronic apparatus before being 

 allowed to work with ready-made recording systems. Even those who 

 at the time slightly resented being returned to the electronic kinder- 

 garten, thought it in retrospect invaluable to have mastered the details, 

 though experts were available to manage the apparatus thereafter. 

 The present book carries on this tradition and enables a biologist to 

 understand the basis, and thus the capabilities and hmitations, of the 

 methods available to him. 



Donaldson, working and writing in a laboratory which has been 

 a main centre of electrophysiology for 50 years and in the forefront 

 of the biological use of electronic devices for more than 30, has presented 

 not only a compendium of the formal bones of these techniques, but 

 also incorporated many of those little points of know-how that come 

 from long practical experience. 



I think this book will be valuable both to the beginner entering this 

 field and also to the more experienced, for its comprehensiveness 

 makes it a reference work of electronics in biology. 



Bryan Matthews 

 Physiological Laboratory, 

 Cambridge 



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