Summary and Future Research Needs

Dr. Bromberg: This is a remarkable meeting in that, with very few exceptions, almost no mention was made of pulmonary mechanics and of gas exchange. That doesn't happen very often in meetings devoted primarily to lung research, but perhaps has been happening more frequently in the recent past and it may indicate a trend for the future. Another interesting note was that almost everyone is working or collaborating with an ultrastructuralist, or would like to have access to ultrastructural techniques. Dr. Reid, among others, gave us a very nice demonstration of how ultrastructural techniques can be combined with biochemical techniques in experimental studies of the reaction of the lung to insults. Dr. Satir presented most elegant ultrastructural biochemical data on the mechanism of ciliary motion. The organization of the meeting, as I perceive it, looks at the lung as having three segments. There was a large area of attention to the epithelium, and at the end, there was a large area of attention to the endothelium. In the middle, I suppose appropriately, there were a number of speakers who talked about cells that more or less fit between the epithelium and the endothelium. Notably missing, or in large measure missing, were discussions of smooth muscle and of neural function at more than a passing level. The keynote of the epithelial sections was set by Dr. Boucher and Dr. Gatzy, who pointed to the barrier function of the epithelium and the attempts to quantitate the nature and the site of this barrier. They paid special attention to the intercellularjunctions and the so-called tight junctions of the epithelium and defined their properties by electrical measurements and by using a variety of non-charged probe molecules.