The fourth Wisconsin Symposium on Human Biology took place in Madison, Wisconsin, May 22-25, 2006, under beautiful Spring weather (which typically precedes the less enjoyable long, hot, humid Wisconsin summer). This symposium is held once every two or three years (the previous meeting was in 2003) and the series is shaping up as one of the most ambitious-and interesting-of multidisciplinary symposium programmes in the United States. The breadth of this particular meeting is indicated by its subtitle: "Analysis & Synthesis, The Individual and the Environment, Robustness and Plasticity". An explicit goal of the organisers is to promote provocative, multidisciplinary thinking within a university setting. The University of Wisconsin, with its distinguished and long history of research on and discoveries in basic biology generally and human health, more specifically, is a highly suitable university venue for this kind of intellectual venture. Nearly 50 years ago, C.R Snow, in a lecture at the University of Cambridge, discussed the enormous gulf in understanding and communication between the humanities and the sciences, the problem of the "two cultures". Today, in biology alone, there are nearly comparably large splits between the different disciplines. The symposium series is, in effect, a bet that a comprehensive university can bring together highly specialized investigators to address shared problems from complementary angles, in an effective and insightful fashion.
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