It has become an annual custom for the Physiological Society of Philadel- phia to sponsor a spring symposium in honor of A. N. Richards (876-1966), a research pharmacologist who developed the classical micropuncture tech- nique for studying kidney function. The A. N. Richards Symposium for 1979 was held on April 23-24 in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The theme of this symposium was "The Actions of Taurine on Excitable Tissues." Although taurine was discovered as a constituent of bile salts in 1857 by a chemist and an anatomist (Gmelin and Tiedemann), interest today centers chiefly on the...