Opening Remarks

Abstract

I think we had the best introduction to this meeting yesterday evening when we went to a restaurant and had our first taste of Indian food. Looking at the program, I have the same feeling as I had when looking through that menu card. There is abundant food of every kind, food for thought. This is the most ambitious program I have ever seen; the most ambitious conference I have attended. It seems to be one piece because of Drosophila alone. When we contemplate this diversity, we might be inclined to react like the biologists of the forties, before the advent of molecular biology. There were many things not known that had to be described before attempting to understand them. You could just about take any problem and go in any direction: development, behavior, ecology and so on. To contemplate any small parcel of this diversity was socially justified because there was no hope of understanding the rules at any level of biological complexity.