ABSTRACT
In celebration of Allan Hoffman's 70th birthday, a symposium entitled Gels, Genes, Grafts and Giants was held in Maui, Hawaii in December of 2002. This symposium, organized through the UWEB NSF Engineering Research Center, was a great success, with many excellent papers presented by scientists from all over the world over the 3 days it was held. At the symposium, Stuart Cooper observed the many fine presentations and took the opportunity to invite the three of us to organize special issues of Journal of Biomaterials Science Polymer Edition based on the symposium. After considerable discussion among ourselves and Stuart Cooper, it was decided that we would solicit regular scientific articles with content decided by the authors, although we did suggest that the articles be generally related to the topic of the symposium or the mission of the journal. This approach was consistent with the special issues published in honor of Allan's 60th birthday and with the focused content of the journal.
