Since this volume of Annual Review of Pharmacology marks another quinquenium it is a good time to take inventory. Earlier, we noted that the series achieved a stable format in its first five years, and we pointed out the many new topics that demanded review during its first decade of existence.

After fifteen years of publication let us now give especial consideration to the people who bring life to our pages. First, it seems fitting that our initial prefatory chapter was written by Torald Sollmann, Dean of American Pharmacologists for so many years and that the contemporary German pharmacologist Ernst R. Habermann contributed the biography of the father of pharmacology, Rudolph Buchheim.

We are grateful for the intimate glimpse of Arthur Robertson Cushny provided by his daughter and for the personal overviews of pharmacology provided by famous pharmacologists from Belgium, England, Germany, India, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and this year, from Russia.

Just as the prefatory chapters indicate the global distribution of pharmacologists, so do the nationalities of our reviewers. The editorial committee strives to keep the book international so in any given year one fourth to one half of our chapters are written by scientists from countries other than the United States. While this may cause us to look harder for overseas authors we are certainly not parochial in choosing reviewers by discipline. About half of our authors do not call themselves pharmacologists or toxicologists. Most of the nonpharmacologists are associated with medicine, biochemistry, or physiology, or another of the life sciences. Thus, pharmacologists get the benefit of other points of view, and the molecule-to-man scope of pharmacology is emphasized.

We hope you enjoy reading Annual Review of Pharmacology as much as we enjoy putting it together, and for their indispensable roles in this, our deep gratitude to assistant editor, Toni Haskell and to our faithful indexers Dorothy Read and Mary Glass.

THE EDITORIAL COMMITTEE