Recent developments in recombinant DNA technology have led to the large-scale production of human erythropoietin and to the demonstration that it is effective in the treatment of renal and possibly some other anaemias. This has lent a new impetus to studies of the pathophysiology and pharmacology of the hormone which is reflected in this report of the proceedings of a meeting held in Liibeck in June 1988. In 15 papers, all from European centres, the broad topics covered are erythropoietin's physiology and chemistry, the patho- physiology of erythropoiesis and the use of erythropoietin in the treatment of anaemia. Several of the papers include up-to-date reviews of the literature. The field is now expanding rapidly, and this volume, though not comprehensive, usefully points up many areas of recent understanding as well as others of continuing un- certainty. Overall, it contains material likely to be of interest to biochemists and experimental haematologists as well as to phar- macologists, clinical haematologists and nephrologists.

I am honored to be invited to prepare a foreword for the proceedings of the Second International Lubeck Conference on Erythropoietin (Epo). I congratulate Wolfgang Jelkmann, Horst Pagel and Christoph Weiss for their organization of an excellent program for this conference which updated all of us on the advances made in erythropoietin research during the past few years since the first conference in June of 1988. I am sure that Professor Paul Carnot, had he been present at this conference, would be very pleased and proud of the advances made in the field of erythropoietin since his and Madame DeFlandre's seminal finding in 1906 (1) that rabbits produced a humoral substance following bleeding which controls red blood cell production. The reports by Hjort in 1936 (2) and by Erslev in 1953 (3) that large volumes of plasma or serum from rabbits following a bleeding stimulus, when injected into normal donor rabbits, produced a reticulocytosis, were very significant in confirming the existence of a humoral factor which controls erythropoiesis. Reissmann's parabiotic rat experiments in 1950 (4) reawakened interest in erythropoietin when he proved that hypoxia stimulated the production of a factor which regulates red cell produc tion. The studies of several investigators such as Jacobson et al. (5), Fisher and Birdwell (6), Kuratowska et al. (7) and Nathan et al."