54 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS held in Chicago in September. He discussed the nervous sytem of the corium of primates including man. It would appear that the sensations of warmth, cold, touch and pain do not demand any special form of nerve endings. The complexity of the nervous system in any particular portion of the skin directly affects the acuteness of the perception and it is to be noted that the hair follicles are well supplied. Thus, the hairs function as the first line of defence in guarding against physical damage. You can test this for yourself. The merest contact of anything with even one single hair--be it velus or terminal--will cause nerve stimulation and this will pass straight through to the brain and the point of contact will immediately be located. Of course, in areas of the skin where there are no nerve endings there is no feeling of paiv or itching. And it is a characteristic of old age that the ramification of the nerves in the skin is significantly reduced in density and extcnt. Clearly if work of this fundamental type is progressed we shall in due time begin to understand the mechanism by which nerve stimulation is brought about and also the sequence of events which transpose the stimuli into consciousness. When this story is fully told laboratory methods of assessment will be devised to measure these aesthetic reactions in terms of scientific values. Let us return to van Dool, whose paper is one of many indicating the tremendous advances which are being made in the realm of perfumery via spectro-photometry and chromatography. In the main, the results are being used analytically chiefly as a means of measuring purity. Practical application of the results is made notably within the field of synthetic perfumery but generally by a method of trial and error plus the experience of the skilled perfumer. If and when we know how odours stimulate nerve endings, then we shall really be getting places and a clarification of the pattern of perfumery will break on an awaiting world. It is almost impossible for the cosmetic chemist to move very far from the realms of physiology which, of course, is the science of the processes which go on in all living things. It is here that of recent times a great step forward has been made which must have a considerable impact on cosmetic science. It has been appreciated for many years that in the case of man, skin grafting can be done only by the use of homo grafts, i.e. the replacement tissue must be obtained from the same individual except in the instance of identical twins. With this exception, each individual is unique, that is, different from any other person. In 1945, Ray Owen in the United States showed that in the case of cows, non identical twins, even though of different sex, did have a tolerance to each other's cells. This appears to happen because both animals shared

SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS the same blood circulation in the womb. Sir Macfarlane Burnet investi- gated this matter in Melbourne as did also P. B. Medawar in London, who confirmed that successful grafting occurred in ninety per cent of the cases, thus indicating that here were conditions which produced a natural immuno- logical tolerance. Medawar and his colleagues directed their work towards finding a method by which tolerance could be produced experimentally between animals of different strains. They succeeded in doing titis by injecting spleen cells from one strain of mice into other mice of a different strain but the recipients had to be newly born. After a few days the skin of the donor grafted successfully on the recipient and indeed vice versa. This discovery is of tremendous importance and as you probably know Burnet and Medawar have, jointly, been awarded the 1960 Nobel prize for medicine. This is the first break-through of the hitherto impenetrable immunological barrier, and it opens up a huge field in plastic surgery. If practical means of creating tolerances in the young and the adult can be discovered then the treatment of burns and large areas of superficial damage will be simplified in that many more donors of skin will be available. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this work could lead to modification of the allergic susceptibilities of many individuals, the incidence of which in its bewildering array is a constant source of trouble and tribulation in the realm of cosmetic formulation. As an experimental technique, I might be permitted to mention that a team of research workers which my old firm has been sponsoring at Sheffield University have already made use of the Medawar procedure. We are investigating the problem of how far, if at all, hair growth is governed by the heredity factor of the hair follicle and whether the transplanting of old skin on to a young animal will rejuvenate the growing hairs and alternatively whether young skin transplanted on an old animal will lose its growth pattern. These experiments have shown reasonable success but, of course, there is still much to do. I would prefer not to anticipate the publication of the results so far obtained but the work is at this moment "in press" and will be available in the next month or so. Whatever may be the final conclusion, we will certainly have an experimental method which will enable us to test various substances in relation to their ability to augment the growth of hair. The solution of this problem will undoubtedly provide an answe• to a long felt want. I trust that this necessarily short and incomplete picture of the future of our industry has not bored you and I would thank you for listening to it. Mr. A. Herzka, a member of Council of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists of Great Britain then conveyed greetings on behalf of Dr. H. W. Hibbott,