The results of a symposium, held in Amsterdam in October 1967, are published in this small volume. The chairman of the symposium hoped that "the interdisciplinary study of inborn metabolic disorders which give rise to brain lesions . . . constitute a characteristic model of biological-psychiatric research."
Pediatricians, neurologists, and a psychiatrist are ably represented in this symposium, although their emphasis is entirely biochemical. In particular, most of the participants discussed disorders of amino acid metabolism. Jonxis (Groningen) considered some general aspects of amino acid disorders, illustrating his concepts with the results of his own recent clinical and biochemical investigations. Screening procedures for disorders of amino acid metabolism were discussed by Wadman (Utrecht), Fleury (Amsterdam), and Bickel (Heidelburg). Gaull (Staten Island, NY) cast a critical eye upon our present concepts of the pathogenesis of the brain damage of inborn errors of amino