To understand Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the major thrusts of present-day clinical
research strongly supported by more fimdamental cellular biochemical immunological and
structural studies. It is these latter that receive attention within this book. This
compilation of 20 chapters indicates the diversity of work currently in progress and summarizes
the current state of knowledge. Experienced authors who are scientifically active in their
fields of study have been selected as contributors to this book in an attempt to present a
reasonably complete survey of the field. Inevitably some exciting topics for one reason or
another have not been included for which we can only apologize. Standardization of terminology
is often a problem in science not least in the Alzheimer field editorial effort has been made
to achieve standardization between the Chapters but some minor yet acceptable personal
author variation is still present i. e. P-amyloid amyloid-P Ap42 Apl-42 APi. 42! The book
commences with a broad survey of the contribution that the range of available microscopical
techniques has made to the study of Alzheimer's amyloid plaques and amyloid fibrillogenesis.
This chapter also serves as an Introduction to the book since several of the topics introduced
here are expanded upon in later chapters. Also it is significant to the presence of this
chapter that the initial discovery of brain plaques by Alois Alzheimer utilized light
microscopy a technique that continues to be extremely valuable in present-day AD research.
