Book excerpt: The challenge of bioseparations is to isolate and purify identified products from the dilute product broth produced from cell culture. Innovation in bioseparations technology is increasingly driven by the requirements imposed by the growing importance of production on a process scale of injectable-grade products, and economic pressures to improve the efficiency of downstream processing. As in other areas of technical change, science does not necessarily precede new technology: progress results from a complex and messy mixture of advances in understanding, ingenious ideas, novel techniques and chance discoveries. What is certain is that close interaction between academics and practitioners, biological scientists and process engineers is needed to solve the problems of bioseparations. The Second International Conference on Separations for Biotechnology at Reading, UK, in September 1990 set out to provide a critical multidisciplinary forum for the discussion of bioseparations. This volume contains the papers presented at the meeting. The meeting was organised around six themes with oral and poster presentations on the science and practice of bioseparations technology, and the same structure has been kept for this book. We have also included the texts of the keynote review paper by Professor Alan Michaels and the introductory review papers specially commissioned for the conference. Within each part of this book the review paper is followed by the contributed papers grouped alphabetically by their first author. All the original papers published here were accepted for publication after scientific refereeing.