Progress in Basic and Clinical Immunology is a result of the 14th European Immunology Meeting - EFIS 2000, held in Poznan, Poland, on 23-27 September 2000. EFIS 2000 gathered over 1400 immunologists from all over the world. It was an exceptionally memorable meeting for a number of reasons: 1) it was held in the last year of the century and the millennium, thus provoking conclusions of past achievements of immunology and projections for the future; 2) it was held in Poland, a country that is a symbol of struggle for freedom for a large number of scientists originating from the Eastern...

Proceedings of the International Symposium on Polymer Therapeutics - Recent Progress in Clinics and Future Prospects, held July 13-14, 2001, in Nara, Japan.

The technology of polymer science has developed considerably during the past half-century, and this volume describes some of the aspects of this technology that will have a great impact in the future. Among these advances, for example, are gene delivery to specific disease sites and carrier polymers that respond to a stimulus or particular environment. Cancer targeted drug delivery is another focused area of this volume because...

For the eighth time the yersiniologists all over the world gathered together when the International Symposium on Yersinia was organized by University of Turku and Turku Microbiology Society in Turku, Finland. Over 250 delegates from 28 countries attended the Symposium. The Symposium logo (Picture 4, next page) presents a bacteriophage attached to the surface of the bacterium. One can easily imagine that most of the aspects covered in this Symposium are included in the logo: the bacteriophage genome encodes for structural proteins, adhesins and effector proteins that interact with the host...

th This volume contains selected lectures presented at the 12 International Conference on Advances in Prostaglandin, Leukotriene and Other Bioactive Lipid Research: Basic Science and Clinical Applications which was held in Istanbul, Turkey, on August 25-29, 2002. This meeting brought together basic and clinical scientists for the purpose of discussing advances in bioactive lipid research with.special attention to cancer, cardiovascular diseases, gastrointestinal diseases and respiratory diseases. Topics covered included: the role of leukotrienes and lipoxins in of inflammation, the cytochrome...

The Taurine Symposium- "Taurine: Beginning the 21'' Century"- was held September 20-23, 2002, on the beautiful island of Kauai in Hawaii. The headquarters of the meeting was the Radisson Kauai Beach Resort. This international meeting was attending by approximately 80 individuals from 23 nations and 4 continents. Seventy-five papers were presented either as platform presentations or poster presentations. Taurine, first isolated from ox bile in 1827 by Tiedemann and Gmelin and named in 1838 by Demarcay, became of significant scientific interest in 1968 when the first extensive review article...

Recent years have seen an upsurge of significant interest in cell-based technologies. A range of productive and lively debate have taken place relating to tissue engineering, namely the construction of tissues and whole organs using molecularly-designed resorbable biomaterials to create tissue de novo, the potential use of human embryonic stem cells for transplantation and regenerative medicine, with similar potential for adult-derived stem cells, and gene therapy, in relation to cell transplantation. New findings in biomimetic materials, cell signalling pathways, extracellular matrix...

Christiaan Eijkman received the Nobel prize for Medicine in 1929 for his discovery that beri-beri is a vitamin-deficiency disease. He had conducted his seminal research on the disease in the fonner Dutch East Indies between 1886 and 1898 at the location of. the present Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta. In 1998, the first International Eijkman Symposium was held in The Hague, The Netherlands, to celebrate the fact that exactly 100 years earlier Christiaan Eijkman was inaugurated as full professor in Hygiene and Bacteriology at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. The...

Since 1959, the International Society of Arterial Chemoreception (ISAC) has organized in a variety of countries fifteen scientific meetings devoted to the mechanisms of peripheral arterial chemoreception and chemoreceptor reflexes. After the meeting held in Philadelphia with Sukhamay Lahiri as president, ISAC membership elected Lyon (CNRS, University Claude Bernard, France) as the site of the xv" ISAC Symposium. The Symposium was effectively held in Lyon from the 18th to the 22nd of November 2002 and Jean-Marc Pequignot was its president. The organizers were Jean-Marc Pequignot and Yvette...

This book focuses on the current basic science research of hypospadias and genital development. Congenital anomalies of the genitalia are the second most common birth abnormality besides congenital heart defects. Genital anomalies come in many varieties with the most common abnormality being hypospadias. The etiology of hypospadias remains unknown and the incidence is doubling in western countries with no definable explanation. It therefore seems especially germane to study this common congenital anomaly with a baseline incidence of 1/125-250 newborn males.

Although some decades have passed, there are still worldwide controversies about a concept of human death on neurological grounds. There are also disagreements on the diagnostic criteria for brain death, whether clinical alone or clinical plus ancillary tests. Moreover, some scholars who were strong defenders of a brain-based standard of death are now favoring a circulatory-respiratory standard. The study of coma is extremely important because lesions of the brain are responsible for quality of life in patients or cause of death. The main goal of Brain Death and Disorders of...