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The contents of this book come from a meeting about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) conducted in October 1994, in Marseille, France, in which the "primary goal," according to one of the editors, was "to identify current controversies and propose solutions." As is often true in volumes that compile work from centers in several countries (in this case, France, the United States, Tunisia, Sweden, Canada, Hungary, England, Australia, Switzerland, and Italy), the controversies, for the most part, are only implicit in the articles themselves. Their solution is, perforce, left to another time and place. This is true despite the formal organization of the meeting (primary presenter followed by two designated discussants). The discussants usually present their own data, and the reader is left to make the connections. As an elementary example of what happens as a result, the Babinski sign in ALS is "rarely positive" (Munsat, p 212), "usually absent" (Marseille