The prevention of birth defects in the human populations caused by exogenous chemicals is a goal of both primary care providers, drug developers, experimental teratologists, and risk assessors. This two-volume work provides a state-of- the-science assessment of how embryos accomplish the feat of morphogenesis at the molecular and cellular level, the key biochemical processes that drive morphogenesis and which are thus at risk to disruption, and the mechanisms of action by which known human teratogens exert their unwanted effects. These volumes provide the first comprehensive compilation of...

Having received the invitation from Springer-Verlag to produce a volume on drug-induced birth defects for the Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology, we asked ourselves what new approach could we offer that would capture the state of the science and bring a new synthesis of the information on this topic to the world's literature. We chose a three-pronged approach, centered around those particular drugs for which we have a relatively well established basis for understanding how they exert their unwanted effects on the human embryo. We then supplemented this information with a series of reviews...