The burgeoning interest in biomembranes in recent years has been such that "membranology" is now virtuMtyasubject in its own right, cutting vertically, as it were, through the strata of conventional disciplines from mathematics and physics, through chemistry, to biology. The very scope of the topic is thus so daunting that it is tempting to treat it only at one stratum of this hierarchy, be it the biophysics of phospholipid bilayers or the biochemistry of interactions at the cell surface. Such an approach is entirely valid, particularly among specialists with common interests. However, this...