The clinical picture of diseases, caused by trinucleotide repeats, such as fragile X syndrome, myotonic dystrophy, Huntington's disease and forms of spinocerebella ataxia, provide the starting point for this authoritative review volume.
The book proceeds to integrate the current understanding of the molecular pathologies of these diseases, their genotype-phenotype relationships, the mutational processes involved and the laboratory and clinical issues relating to genetic testing for these disorders.
Clinicians and researchers in genetics, neuroscience, pediatrics and psychiatry will all benefit from the comprehensive overviews contributed by recognized world experts.

It is a pleasure to send Dr. Hayden's monograph on its way to as yet unknown but hopefully widespread destinations with all the valedictions a Foreword may contain. Since I met the author in Cape Town in 1978 I have been struck, on numerous occasions, by the fortuitous combination of an inquisitive mind, a creative drive, a sharp awareness of the historical and social setting of phenomena, and a solid discipline which his personality displays behind a good-natured laugh. If a tree is known by its fruits, both Dr Hayden's PhD thesis and the present monograph afford quite an insight into the auctor intellectualis. The amalgamation of the terrible mise ry behind scientifIc facts and the elegantly artistic presentation of this book will leave none of its readers unperturbed. It reminds me of Nietzsche's 'Denn das Schone ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, und wir bewundern es so weil es gelassen verschmaht uns zu zerstoren' (Beauty is but Horror's beginning, and we admire it because it resignedly spurns to destroy us). The book is a denial, a testimony against Juvenal's spurious 'Sternmata quid faciunt ... ' (of what value are pedigrees). For it is the very genetical prolongation of misery over the centuries that brought Huntington's chorea to South Africa, Australia and the USA from the shores of sea-faring seventeenth-century England and Holland."

My personal witness, as the multiple keyboard player/back-ground singer and one of the Creatures of the Street, in the band JOBRIATH, during our ten month journey, starting with my audition, then the band's rehearsal for the Midnight Special and subsequent national tour, all against the homophobic backlash which Bruce Wayne Campbell, a.k.a. Jobriath's own self-outing made him a "dead man walking." We played on. Even the gay community resented him being paraded as their "'poster child, ' demonstrating attributes they loathed in themselves." Though the rest of the band was straight, so extreme was this hostility, we were specifically not booked in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Detroit, for fear of us being physically harmed. Even in New York, we were booed off the stage at the Nassau Coliseum for being "fagots." Jerry Brandt, was Jobriath's larger-than-life manager. Like Colonel Parker to Elvis, Jerry created a huge hype machine that took America and Britain by storm: "Elvis, The Beatles, Jobriath " With only fifty thousands dollars and a single album record deal, Jerry created a half-a-million dollar media blitz and a mountain of jealousy that would subsequently be impossible to overcome.