Only five years ago, nobody in his right mind would have consid- ered publishing a book on reeler as a model for brain develop- ment. Although this interesting mutation has been with us for half a century, it is fair to say that, in spite of a wave of enthusiasm in the late sixties and early seventies, generated primarily by Sidman, Caviness and colleagues, studies of reeler mice fell pro- gressively out of fashion during the next two decades. All that changed almost overnight when the cloning of the reeler gene, dubbed reelin, was reported in Tom Curran's laboratory in 1995. The fact that...