Opening Remarks

Abstract

The opening of this Third International Symposium may be an occasion for us to take a brief glance backward before we plunge into the exciting program ahead of us. When the First Symposium was held here in 1960, interest in what drugs might do for us by affecting lipid metabolism was certainly lively enough, enough to produce a rewarding program and a respectable volume of Proceedings. Yet, even at that time, I remember consulting the indices of several well-known textbooks of pharmacology and failing to find so much as an entry under cholesterol, triglycerides or free fatty acids. If we step back to 1955, when our own interest was first attracted to the possibilities of chemotherapy, it was difficult to find any research going on in the area. Peterson and coworkers had shown that sitosterol worked in animals and Pollak that it worked in man; Altschul, with his championing of nicotinic acid, had already made an important contribution; heparin, which had recently been shown to be involved in the clearing reaction, was being eyed as a therapeutic agent in a new mode; and Cottet was testing the efficacy of α-phenylbutyrate. But the list was not much, if any, longer and certainly purposeful exploration of approaches and compounds had yet to begin.