Biodeterioration held April 20-23, 1981, at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland. The symposium was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research to provide an organized forum for the discussion of progress in basic and applied research con cerning marine biodeterioration. The symposium was structured to cover interdisciplinary topics of interest both to the basic research community and the applied science and engineering communities. In each major topic area, a comprehensive overview paper summarizing highlights of the past two decades of research is followed by current technical papers concerning both basic and applied re search. Authors were urged to provide extensive refer ences, and their papers were subjected to external peer review. In some respects, the symposium was structured to pro vide a reference tool for the marine engineering com munity that would supplement the excellent monograph entitled "Marine Fouling and Its Prevention" prepared for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships in 1952 by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. While these proceedings can not begin to update that work, they can, by presenting the in research direction, recent workers in the field, changes ac and current references, give the interdisciplinary user cess to the current literature in key topic areas."