Introduction

Abstract

By the time we arrived at this final session people had been talking intensively for nearly three days about elastin and elastic tissue, so the conference had fulfilled one of its main purposes. At the same time it posed a problem—would there be anything left to discuss in the open forum on “Molecular Models for Elastin Structure and Function”? On the surface there had been a remarkable amount of agreement among workers whose published views had often seemed quite opposed to each other. Those who work on elastin do so for many reasons, and come from widely varying scientific disciplines. We, therefore, see this remarkable molecule through eyes that have many different cultural biases, much as the blind sages “saw” the elephant through their sense of touch. So we all come up with imperfect pictures, and somehow we must try to fit these into a coherent whole. It became clear that many of the apparent conflicts of ideas were really due to semantic problems rather than to major conceptual differences. This is encouraging, as long as we do not become blind to the possibility that some of our apparent agreements may also rest upon semantics, and be illusory.