The purpose of this symposium is to present current work from the broad field of neural regeneration, while highlighting areas in which there has been some notable recent progress or in which some particularly interesting issues have been raised. The symposium is planned for December 6-10, 1987 at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California and is follow-up to a similar symposium held in December, 1985 at the same site. Co-sponsors of the 1987 symposium will include the Veterans Administration and the Paralyzed Veterans of America, both of whom sponsored the 1985 symposium. The proposed program, which was the product of a meeting of the VA Office of Regeneration Research Programs Advisory Board from October 9- 11, 1986, includes a keynote speaker, two feature speakers, a summary speaker, and six major topic areas to be presented by 31 invited speakers. Overviews of the six topic areas will be given by invited chairpersons of each of these sessions. In addition, there will be free communications in the form of posters contributed by symposium registrants. The number of such registrants is estimated at 250. A session for discussion of the posters has been planned. Although the proceeding of the 1985 symposium are in press (as Volume 71 of Progress in Brain Research, Elsevier Science Publishers), the planned program for December, 1987 was felt to be sufficiently different to warrant another publication, and therefore a publication of the proceedings is planned under the editorship of Paul J. Reier, Richard P. Bunge and Fredrick J. Seil. The longer range plan is to hold these symposia on alternate years at the same location, as an alternative or a supplement to the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, where the bulk of the neural regeneration research results are presented. The Society for Neuroscience meeting is organized in multiple simultaneous sessions and has grown to an almost unwieldy size. The proposed meeting at Asilomar will have a single session format, will be dedicated to a specific area of research, and has been organized to allow a good deal of time for relaxed interchange between investigators, e.g., free time in the afternoons. This format was very successful during the 1985 symposium.
