The Annual Beltsville Symposium provides a forum for interaction among scientists involved in research that is vitally important to agri- culture and to the agricultural sciences. The Twelfth Symposium in this series focused on the unifying biochemical and physiological mechan- isms controlling growth and development of biological systems - ani- mals, plants insects. Unraveling the complex biochemical mechanisms associated with the sequencing of organism growth and development and identifying, locating, and manipulating key control mechanisms are essential in utilizing the full potential of...