Old friends of Annual Review of Pharmacology will have noticed by now that something new has been added—we start our fourth quinquennium as Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology. While we have always recognized toxicology as an important area of pharmacology, there are many reasons for this special recognition in 1976. Perhaps the most important are increasing concern with the toxicology of nonmedical agents, the many toxicologists now in the field who were not trained primarily in classical pharmacology, and the proliferation of societies and regulatory agencies devoted to toxicology. We hope that the new title will help preserve the unity of the discipline. We are all concerned with the effects of chemicals (drugs) upon biological systems, and all chemicals can cause adverse effects (toxicity). No review is complete without some reference to toxicity, but it is not by accident that this volume contains nine reviews dealing predominantly with some aspect of toxicology. Some deal with toxicity related to therapeutics, others with accidental or industrial poisoning, and three with various methods for evaluation of pulmonary toxicity. These reviews emphasize both the scope of toxicology and its interdependence with other aspects of pharmacology.

We trust that old and new friends alike will be pleased with this and future volumes of Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology and will join us in expressing here our thanks to our assistant editor Toni Haskell and our indexers Dorothy Read and Mary Glass.

The Editorial Committee