The first Meadowbrook Symposium was held in 1978 and during the intervening ten years our knowledge concerning how steroid hormones function at the level of gene expression has advanced by leaps and bounds. In this volume, which sum marizes our fourth meeting, these advances are very evident. What seemed like science fiction ten years ago has become commonplace science. Who would have imagined that we could synthesize a nucleotide sequence that binds a specific steroid receptor and acts as a controlling element for gene expression? No one; but as is evident from the results reported in...

The field of steroid hormone action has continued to expand into the realm of molecular biology at a pace even faster than most of us ever imagined. techniques of molecular biology have made it possible to clone The hormone-regulated genes and to examine steroid-receptor interactions with these genes. Nucleotide sequences of these genes, which show preferential binding of steroid receptors, have been identified. These results are complemented by the identification of chromatin acceptor proteins, which also show preferential binding for steroid-receptor complexes. Thus, one can envision the...