CAIRDNER .-L -:- LECTURE

INTRODUCTION

    This period in human history is known as the Age of Communication.
Never before has human kind been bombarded with as many informational
inputs from so many sources, much of it designed to pacify the populace
and to propagate the desires of the State in its effort to maintain:
power. Democracy or not, cur environment dictates that each of us must process

the available information in a manner that best fits our individual and

societal needs if we are to survive what is clearly a hostile environment.

   Strangely, howfeer
           now appears that any set of signals or messages is
capable of organizing and galvanizing our behaviour, often with disastrous

consequences. As the Canadian philosopher , McCluan, once said," The Medium
is the Message", specific content matters little.
    Not so in the case of biological information transfer as seen

from the scientific perspective. In real life reception is highly
specific, the responses are rapid and selective, signal processing
is integrative ;i.e., societal, and responses promptly decay in time
when the incoming signals are withdrawn. No time for remembrances of
things past; survivability is dependent on organization.Once the
key elements have been shown effective by natural selection, Nature
uses them over and over again. In essence, that is the story of
information transfer as revealed in the past decade of research

in this area.

    In this brief lecture I will describe the contributions
that my colleagues and I have made in the hormone transduction field.
I will conclude with what I believe is the portent of things to come starting
in this Orwellian year of 1984.