Book excerpt: This volume contains the Proceedings of the Serono Symposium on Pre implantation Embryo Development, held in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1991. The idea for the symposium grew out of the 1989 Serono Symposium on Fertilization in Mammals* at which preimplantation development was the predominant suggestion for a follow-up topic. This was indeed a timely subject in view of the recent resurgence of interest in this funda mental phase of embryogenesis and its relevance to basic research and applied fertility studies in humans, food-producing animals, and endangered species. The symposium brought together speakers from a broad range of disciplines in order to focus on key regulatory mechanisms in embryo development, using a wide variety of animal models, and on representative topics in human preimplantation embryogenesis. The culmination of preimplantation development is a blastocyst con taining the first differentiated embryonic tissues and capable of initiating and sustaining pregnancy. The central objective of the symposium was to throw light on the regulation of cellular and molecular events underlying blastocyst formation. It was particularly appropriate that the date of the symposium marked the 20th anniversary of the publication of the classic volume Biology of the Blastocyst, the proceedings of an international workshop held in 1970. This book, which summarized most of the information then available on this topic in mammals, was edited by the pioneer in blastocyst research, Dr. Richard B1andau, who was the guest speaker at the symposium.