Frontiers in Crustacean Neurobiology

Donald Kennedy President, Stanjord University Alnwst exactly a dozen years elapsed between the time I set aside (I thought temporarily!J my own interest in crustacean nervous systems and the arrival of an invitation from Konrad Wiese to participate in this symposium. The intervening years have plainly been productive ones for the field; indeed, I can only hope that there is no causal connection between its properity and my absence. Discontinuous contact with an intellectual venture, whatever disappointments it may present. does oifer one virtue; it provides a nwre dramatic. alnwst stroboscopic view of progress. To the lapsed practitioner, the rate of advance in crustacean neurobiology over the decade seems remarkable; equally remarkable is the number of able young researchers. many of them the scientific progeny of my colleagues from the “sixties” and “seventies” . How to summarize the changes they have wrought? Those of us who began working with crustacean nervous systems thirty years 090 or so were attracted by several features. First of alt there was a limited nwtor system with readily identifiable neurons. It was diJft.cult to look at those old methylene blue stains of Retzius and not want to do an experiment immediately! Kees Wiersma ojten did, and it was he who nwst persuasively called our attention to the advantages oifered by neuronal parsinwny in combination with stereotyped motor output patterning. Ted Bullock exploited these features in his elegant early experiments on cardiac ganglia.