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The American Society for Artificial Internal Organs has promptly published the transactions of their meeting of April, 1964, and they represent highly informative papers on recent investigations as reported to the Society now numbering about 300 members. These members are physicians, biophysicists, engineers, and industrial consultants with a strong practical orientation in their work. This is one of the striking characteristics of the field of artificial internal organs, where empiricism and pragmatic values reign supreme. So much may be accomplished by the application of established principles in related fields that many years will be needed for theory to advance to the point where it may be of greater help than experience.
Of the 80-odd reports, almost one half are concerned with the artificial kidney or hemodi- alysis. Pump-oxygenators and artificial hearts are described in another quarter of the reports, and the remaining articles cover such pertinent topics as anticoagulation, synthetic