Protein Nutrition is a collection of eight papers presented at a conference sponsored by the Harvard Medical School, Departments of Surgery and Medicine, in November 1971. As in all such conferences, there is a great deal of unevenness in the quality of the various presentations, and this is especially striking in this slim volume. Several of the papers were already outdated at the time of presentation and cover the subject matter in a very superficial manner. In addition, the book suffers from the delay of three years between presentation and publication.
I do not know if there were any special aims of this conference not mentioned in the preface, but it is difficult to ascertain why some subjects were included and other much more important aspects of protein nutrition were omitted. For example, two of the eight chapters are devoted to the chemical synthesis of peptides, including exact procedures and