| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
Letters to the Editor |
CeSSIAM, Guatemala City, Guatemala
Dear Sir:
The term deep has 2 antonyms, both of which are relevant to the letter of Watzl: one is superficial, which means scratching only the surface; the other is broad, which relates to spreading out widely, as opposed to penetrating profoundly, but over a narrow range. The scientific editor of the ILSI Europe Concise Monograph Series takes exception to my use of the word superficial in my review of the monograph Nutrition and Immunity in Man (1). The term superficial is not necessarily pejorative, as the famous cliché from early Westerns, "It's nothin'...only a flesh wound," would imply. (The bullet scratched the surface, rather than penetrating to the core of the cowboy, which would have removed him from the scene.) Obviously—and admittedly by the inner-cover description in the ILSI series—the material in the Concise Monograph Series is not meant to be profound. The excerpted quotation in Watzl's letter says this in so many words, and I restated the same in my book review. Hence, we agree on the facts, if not the intonations. One does not have to have a textbook, however, to get an in-depth treatment of a topic; the full publication of the proceedings of a scientific meeting can also go beyond the surface in a deep—albeit not concise—manner.
Watzl addresses another comment of mine: that of the topics not mentioned in the monograph, eg, the immunologic aspects of breast-feeding and maternal milk. This was my signal that the Nutrition and Immunity monograph was also not overly broad in relation to the possibilities suggested by its title. As indicated by the book editor, however, this particular volume in the ILSI Europe Concise Monograph Series was derived from a scientific meeting of the same title held in Atlanta in May 1997, from which the papers were distilled and edited to conciseness. Hence, the book could only be as broad as the range of topics included among the original invited papers. Interestingly, in his book review of the latest textbook in the field, Nutrition and Immunity: Principles and Practice, Hoerr (2) called for a "broader coverage" for some topics he found to be under-addressed. So even 520 pages and 38 chapters cannot satisfy some people's voracity for breadth in this topic area!
Finally, with respect to the issue of immunity and cancer, my concern was aimed at the basic understanding of the linkage of these 2 issues, and few would suggest that immune surveillance is not linked to cancer propagation or that cancer does not influence the immune response. The monograph authored by Langseth skimmed the surface of a range of basic topics for the orientation of the reader; that cancer and nutrition received shorter shrift probably relates to the fact that the original meeting had little of oncologic interest on its program. The issues of "diet" (and "lifestyle" raised by Watzl) in relation to immunity in relation to cancer go well beyond the essential omission I was pointing to in the monograph.
Just as those who publish books called encyclopedias should not take offense when their texts are termed tedious and redundant, those who place the badge of concise on their works should not be surprised when the S word is applied. These are part of the family of descriptive terms meant to assist the readers of the Journal in choosing between a $12.50 investment for 26 pages (3) or a $149.50 outlay for 520 pages (4) when it comes to updating their understanding of the intersection of the fields of nutrition and immunity. This is the function and duty of the book review section of any scientific journal.
REFERENCES
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
