The International Society on Oxygen Transport to Tissue (ISOTT) was founded in 1973 "to facilitate the exchange of scientific information among those interested in any aspect of the transport and/or utilization of oxygen in tissues". Its members span virtually all disciplines, ex tending from various branches of clinical medicine such as anesthesiology, ophthalmology and surgery through the basic medical sciences of physiology and biochemistry to the physical sciences and engineering. The fifteenth annual meeting of ISOTT was held in 1987 for three days, from July 22 to 24, at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. Previously, all ISOTT meetings had been held in Europe or the USA alternatively. This time, however, the meeting was held for the first time in an Asian country. When we first started preparing for this meeting some of our members were afraid that the number of those attending would not exceed '30. Fortunately the results were quite different. We had more than 60 participants from abroad and an even greater number from Japan. In addition to three special lectures and two symposia there were a total of 88 posters presented over the three days of the meeting. These covered all aspects of physiological oxygen transport including convection, diffusion, chemical reaction, and control of oxygen demand in blood and various tissues as well as the methods, models and instrumentation for their study. The 92 papers which comprise this volume encompass all of these areas.