That molecular neurobiology has become a dominant part of neuroscience research can be credited to the discovery of inducible gene expression in the brain and spinal cord. This volume deals with genes, whose expression patterns in the vertebrate central nervous system were the first to be revealed and then the most extensively investigated over the last 15 years. Immediate early genes (IEG) and their protein products, especially those acting as regulators of transcription (inducible transcription factors, ITF) have proven to be very valuable tools in functional neuroanatomy and...