Annual review of physiology 10. [antikvár]

That the Annual Review of Physiology is keenly aware of its responsibility for achieving a truly international scope in authorship and coverage is a recurrent theme in these prefaces. We make no apology this year in reasserting this aim. We hold with Julián Huxley1 that the major ethical problem of our time, on which we will be judged by history, is to achieve global unity for man. As the world threatens to fali irrevocably into two armed camps, the need to assert, and where possible to implement by example, the basic unity of mankind becomes ever more pressing. Science is among the few fields of humán activity where this remains possible. The meeting of the International Physiological Congress of Physiology at Oxford last summer, participated in by men and women of many nations, including those with the most divergent political and economic philosophies, demonstrated that such differences are no obstacles in the co-operative activity of science. In this volume the Annual Review has achieved international authorship only in small degree. The four reviews from overseas are all from the British Commonwealth: two from England, and one each from Australia and New Zealand. The reviews which two of our Russian colleagues were to have contributed failed to reach us; that of Assistant Commissar N. Propper-Graschenkov on Cutaneous Sensation has been, at his request, deferred to the next volume. The Board of Editors will in the future continue its efforts to secure contributions from physiologists of highest rank throughout the world. The degree to which we can achieve this goal will reflect the growth or decay of sanity in international aífairs. It is regrettable that, even in our science which is overwhelmingly devoted to the mitigation of the results of humán brutality rather than to their promotion, the free international flow of the results of fundamental scientific investigation continues to be impeded by governments at home and abroad which, to gain a problematical mite of "security" sacrifice a treasured ideál of science. Whatever may be the merits of suppression of technical military application of physiological knowledge, acquiescence by scientists in this tendency as it applies to advances in our basic understanding of nature is a betrayal of their responsibilities to mankind. 1 Julián Huxley, Touchstone for Ethics (Harper & Bros., New York, N. Y., 1947).