NATIJRE VOL.304 28 JULY 1983 BOOK REVIEWS explores the links between carbon in the oceans and the means for investigating Geochemistry: up and atmosphere, sea water and oceanic sedi­ them: the uranium and thorium decay ments, showing how this focal element in chains for determining mixing and down and all around large part controls the chemistry of sea accumulation rates; lead and neodymium the oceans water and the distribution of sediment isotopes as source and reactivity tracers; types, and how perturbations to carbon excess helium as a hydrothermal tracer; Henry Elderfield sources can be linked to past and future and so on. changes in oceanic chemistry. It provides, Overall, this leads to a very stimulating, Tracers In the Sea. too, a topical summary of how chemical reasonably integrated but necessarily By Wallace Smith Broecker tracers give key information on water focused view of what controls distributions and Tsung-Hung Peng. movements. Carbon isotopes play a central of chemicals in the sea. To guide the reader Lamont-Doherty Geological role in such studies: carbon-14, together through the various concepts are twelve Observatory, Columbia University: with the nutrients silicate and phosphate, anagrammatic apostles who, sharing the 1983. Pp.690. $35. and tritium, radon-222, radium-228, heli­ authors' well-known propensity for box um-3 etc., to trace the movements of water models, lurk at the conclusion of each through the deep sea and the oceanic chapter and ask for advice on the interpre­ THE past decade will be judged as crucial thermocline; carbon-13 to trace differences tation of results from their aquaria experi­ in the development of chemical ocean­ in phosphate between water masses, thus ments. Anyone who reads this successful ography. We now know that hydrothermal permitting reconstru-ctions of ocean book, parochialisms and all, will learn a lot circulation of sea water through ocean chemistry in glacial times; and carbon-13 about the chemical driving force in the ridges has a profound effect on the geo­ and carbon-14 to constrath and refine oceans and will appreciate much of the chemistry of elements in the oceans, rival­ models of the oceans' uptake of carbon interplay of ocean physics and biology with ling continental weathering processes in its dioxide produced by the burning of fossil chemical cycles that makes marine geo­ contribution to the dynamics of element fuels. chemistry so fascinating and challenging. D transport across ocean boundaries. Wrapped around this account of the Technical advances in studying trace metal marine carbon cycle are data and ideas Henry Elderfield is in the Department of Earth and isotope distributions in ocean waters, emphasizing the chemical dynamics of the Sciences at the University of Cambridge. in measuring chemical fluxes in particulate materials and in studying the chemistry of pore waters have led to a greater awareness Why study H-Y? the difficulties in writing scientific tomes is of the flow of elements within the marine to make the work interesting to non­ environment. Peter Goodfellow specialists and to translate the precise Further, work using natural and anthro­ scientific words (jargon) into a more pogenic radioactive tracers has added H-Y Antigen and the Biology of Sex generally understood English. Dr Wachtel much to our understanding of the move­ Determination. has solved the first problem by spicing his ment of ocean waters; in particular, the By Stephen S. Wachtel. book with quotations from antiquity and chemical tracers offer the most important Academic/Grune and Stratton: 1983. from the more prescient of contemporary tool we have for studying the oceanic Pp. 302. $44, £29.20. scientists. The second problem has only thermocline. Advances have also been been partly solved: the immunology is made in documenting the chemical history explained clearly but the medical descrip­ of sea water - especially glacial to THE mammalian Y chromosome is tions of the unfortunate individuals with interglacial changes over the past 10s years required for male sexual determination. As indeterminate sexual phenotypes requires and long-term changes related to plate it is almost totally lacking in defmed close study of Gray's Anatomy and a movements and crustal weathering - genetic loci, any gene found on the Y medical dictionary before understanding although serious problems still exist in chromosome has been regarded as poten­ dawns. deciphering the sedimentary record. Man is tially related to sexual determination. However, the final test of a scientific also taking a hand in changing the oceans' Male-specific antigens have been defined book must be the scientific content. The chemistry, and urgent efforts are being by tissue transplantation, in vitro T -cell review of the H-Y antigen literature is made to evaluate the impact of fossil-fuel killing and by serological assays. The exhaustive and gentle; differences in carbon dioxide on the oceans' chemical antigen or antigens recognized by these opinion or results are nearly always cycles. disparate assays are all referred to as ''H-Y reconciled by generous interpretation. In It is also a decade since the publication of antigens" or "H-Y". Transplantation, my view a more critical approach would W.S. Broecker's Chemical Oceanography T-cell killing and, initially, serological have been ultimately more constructive as (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), a assays showed a correlation between the it is difficult for outsiders to form con­ lively, stimulating, arm-waving book and presence of the H-Y antigen and the Y clusions from the baroque serological the predecessor of Tracers in the Sea. In the chromosome, and for this reason H-Y experiments needed to define the H-Y new book, co-written with T.-H. Peng, antigen has been extensively studied as a antigen status of an individual. For Broecker blends an account of these afore­ candidate for the elusive male determining example, it is not clear to me if normal mentioned advances with some material substance. Subsequent work with the females express a basal level of serolo­ from the old to produce a major text. Like serologically defined antigen, particularly gically defined H-Y antigen. its predecessor, the book stimulates by on H-Y antigen positive XO individuals, It was a monumental task to sort through generalization and speculation, and by has relegated the Y-linked gene from a all the papers on H-Y antigen and Dr addressing the explanation rather than the structural to a controlling locus. The Wachtel's book is worth buying as a com­ documentation of how the oceans operate importance of the H-Y antigen in sex pendium of that information. But the book chemically. determination now rests on a series of in will not be the basis of a consensus on the A principal theme is the Earth's carbon vitro functional blocking tests based on the nature of the H-Y antigen and its relation­ cycle and a major data set used is that morphological evaluation of aggregation ship to sex determination. The last word produced by the American GEOSECS of germ cells. remains to be written. D (Geochemical Ocean Sections) pro­ Stephen Wachtel is well qualified to gramme, the success of which was due in write the history of the H •Y antigen and sex Peter Goodfellow is in the Laboratory of large part to Arnold Bainbridge (to whose determination as he has been responsible Human Molecular Genetics at the Imperial memory the book is dedicated). The book for much of the work in this area. Two of Cancer Research Fund, London. © 1983 Nature Publishing Group.