R.E.M. Bowden, E. Zaimis (EDT), B. Collier, R.D. Dripps, L.W. Duchen, G.E. Hale Enderby, B.L. Ginsborg, S. Head, F. Hobbiger, D.H. Jenkinson, F.C. MacIntosh, J. Maglagan, S.E. Smith, E. Zaimis Neuromuscular Junction

Annotation

Has the neuromuscular junction been over-exposed or is it perhaps already a closed book? I asked myself this at a recent International Congress when an American colleague complained that the Journal of Physiology had articles on nothing but the neuromuscular junction, while another colleague asked why I was editing a volume on a subject about which everything was already known. It is worrying to think that these views may be shared by other people. I hope that this volume will convince my two colleagues and other readers that the neuromuscular junction is very much alive and continues to attract the interest of many workers from a variety of fields; strange as it may seem, the synapse between a motor nerve ending and muscle fibre, with its relatively simple architecture, is one of the most inter- esting sites in the body-I do hope we have done it justice. The various chapters of this volume present a cross section of knowledge as viewed by a group of 13 individuals, actively engaged in research. Multi-author volumes such as this are frequently criticised on the grounds that chapters or sec- tions overlap. I believe that such criticium is only valid where the overlap is repetitious. Where it results in the reader having available discussions of material from differing stand-points, overlap becomes a valuable feature of this type of publication.