This supplement to Transplant International contains the Proceedings of the successful 5th Congress of the European Society for Organ Transplantation held in Maastricht from 7-10 October 1991. Of 827 abstracts submitted to the congress, 548 were selected by the Scien tific Committee for either oral or poster presentation. Of these 548 presenta tions, the guest editors selected 212 full papers for publication in this book. Two aspects are important where proceedings are concerned-the quality of the papers and the speed of publication. I thank our authors and guest editors, whose combined expertise has given us a guarantee of quality. I also thank our editorial and production teams for their tremendous efforts to hasten editing, proofreading, printing, and publication. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to Maurits Booster, M.D., and Sylvia van Roosmalen for their assist ance and support in seeing this supplement through to completion. As a concession to time, we have waived some of our stringent rules of style and limited our correspondence with authors by, for example, page proofs being reviewed and corrected in house only. This enables us to publish two months earlier but has the disadvantage that, given the allotted time, we have not been able to ensure that each and every article has an abstract, nor that every "i" has been dotted in the reference lists or in the addresses/institute affiliations of all the authors."