INTRODUCTION T@ CONBERENCE 
E. ROBERTS 
Department of Biochemistry, City of Hope Medical Center, Duarte, Calif. (U.S.A.) 
To date, most of the effort of the biochemist has been devoted to the description of 
the properties of the chemical substances present in living matter. The list is far 
from complete, as evidenced by the daily appearance of reports dealing with the 
characterization of new molecular entities of biological interest. Although it has been 
recognized that substances can pass in and out of living systems and can interact 
and be transformed in these systems in manners potentially explicable by principles 
of physics and chemistry, in no single instance have the details of these processes 
been described adequately for a given substance in a particular type of living cell. 
Although biochemistry had its beginnings as a handmaiden to medicine in attempting 
to correlate manifestations of disease processes with gross chemical changes in blood, 
urine and tissue, in recent years the biochemist has joined with the cytologist and 
microbiologist in combining knowledge and techniques in the study of the chemistry 
and function of parts of various cells, viz., membrane, nucleus, mitochondria, micro- 
somes, etc. However, these efforts have not yet answered the question: How do all 
of the verifiable observations add up to what one observes as life? 
Some of the key questions still to be answered relate to the properties of the bricks 
and mortar of life, the lipids, polysaccharides, proteins, the desoxy- and ribonucleic 
acids, and various complexes and mixtures of these materials. These substances are 
formed largely from smaller molecules by hereditarily determined processes resem- 
bling directed polymerization rather than by random assembly of smaller units. The 
cellular chemistry of even the smaller units is incompletely known. 
The point of departure chosen for this conference was the discussion of free or 
easily extractable amino acids and related substances in living cells, small molecules 
which are not only the building blocks of proteins, but also which have myriad other 
functions within cells. Not only is it of interest to know the quantity of an amino 
acid in a given amount of a particular tissue or cell type, but it is of ultimate interest 
to be able to determine the past history, present position, and future fate of a particular 
molecule in a specific cell. To our knowledge the information relevant to these pro- 
blems which has been accumulated to date in various laboratories throughout the 
world has not been summarized in one place so that an adequate perspective could 
be attained. We are fortunate in having present a number of people who have con- 
tributed importantly to this field and look forward to an exciting exchange of in- 
formation. 
