Vlll PREFACE 



can often be included in these areas. One finds much of the subject to be 

 somewhat disconnected and it is seldom possible to present an orderly- 

 clear version of any inhibition because of the gaps in our knowledge, but 

 one must consider that these isolated strands may some day be woven 

 into a durable fabric. Each chapter has in general been organized so that 

 the treatment proceeds from the simplest system to the higher levels of 

 organization, since this generates progressive understanding it may be 

 hoped, although one occasionally wishes that the effects on the simpler 

 systems could be appreciated against a background of the actions on tissues 

 and animals. Perhaps to some extent the historical introductions at the 

 beginning of most chapters may serve as provisional backgrounds. As in 

 many fields of science one is confronted with the problem of vertical or 

 horizontal presentations. Efforts, however inadequate, have been made to 

 correlate the results at the different levels, and it is hoped that unlike 

 bacteria under certain conditions this volume does not too much exhibit 

 the phenomenon of accumulation without synthesis, or suffer from an even 

 worse danger, that in the psychosynthesis of concepts and over-all pictures 

 some abnormal or spurious units have been lethally incorporated. 



This periplus of the field of enzyme inhibition presents a rather large 

 and often heterogeneous group of information, but everything has been 

 selected for some reason; the reasons may be debatable, since different 

 readers come to a book for different purposes, but occasionally one detects 

 something in a report, perhaps intuitively, which others would not, and 

 hence includes it for reasons difficult to express. The half-life for the general 

 use of a book is, indeed, determined in part by the ability or good fortune 

 of the author to select that which will have the most value or pertinence 

 in the pseudopodal fronts of science. One has no time for justifications, 

 since some decisions have to be made, and only the naive think they can 

 please or help everyone, but there is perhaps one justification I feel impelled 

 to make. Certainly there will be those who ask why the effects of an inhib- 

 itor on the blood pressure or the central nervous system have been pre- 

 sented when there is little or no obvious correlation with any metabolic 

 inhibition, or why I have made up tables of tolerated or lethal doses, and, 

 in general, some may criticize the discussion of inhibitor actions which are 

 likely to be unrelated to enzyme inhibition, or at least for which there is 

 no direct evidence. In defense of this, I can only say that I believe we 

 should not so rigorously categorize the actions of inhibitors. The refusal 

 to consider the nonmetabolic actions has led many investigators to very 

 biased interpretations of their data. If we are interested in the mercurials, 

 we are, I assume, interested in all their possible actions, whether they are 



