Author Description

Sir Archibald Garrod's first book, Inborn Errors of Metabolism (Oxford, 1908; reprint 1963), established chemical individuality as the paradigm of Mendelian variation. At the end of his career, Garrod wrote Inborn Factors in Disease (1931), in which he set out his belief that chemical individuality could result in individuals having a predisposition to certain diseases. It was not well received at the time, but now that many infectious diseases which have been the scourge of previous generations have been controlled, the relative importance of genetic disease has increased dramatically, while the establishment of recombinant DNA methods has made it possible to identify inherited defects and risks in the genes of individuals and families. How these individuals and their families can be helped is a major challenge for today's medicine and for society. Thus, it is timely to reprint Garrod's own words which anticipated that challenge so well. This facsimile reprint contains the entire original text, along with historical commentary and observations regarding Garrod's relevance today.