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...

This volume contains the proceedings of the third in a series of conferences entitled, The International Symposium on Biological Reactive Intermediates. The first was held at the University of Turku in Finland, in 1975, the second at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, in 1980 and the most recent at the University of Maryland in the United States, in 1985. The significance of these conferences has been emphasized by the rapid growth of mechanistic toxicology over the last decade. These conferences were initially stimulated by the attempt to uncover the significance behind the...