The fifth Cold Spring Harbor heat shock meeting, organized by Costa Georgopoulos, Susan Lindquist and Richard Morimoto, was held 1-5 May, 1996. Like the 1994 meeting, which had 408 participants, the 1996 meeting was filled to capacity with an exciting mix of students, postdocs, newcomers and veteran heat shockers. The sizes of the abstract books for these international meetings which began in 1982 are indicative of the growth of this field. If you feel buried in a deluge of journal articles, Figure 1 shows why. The field has been growing exponentially, and although our meeting meter saturated in 1994, the number of articles published annually continues to increase. Costa Georgopoulos, organizer of four of these meetings, and Rick Morimoto, organizer of the last three meetings, will be succeeded by Carol Gross and Arthur Horwich, respectively. They will join Susan Lindquist, an organizer of the last two meetings, to plan the 1998 meeting. In addition to the plenary sessions and posters, two other scientific events occurred at the 1996 meeting. First, the inaugural meeting of the Cell Stress & Chaperones Editorial Board was held. The meeting, organized by our Managing Editor Gillian Griffith, was attended by 31 members of the board. A number of useful suggestions for future development of the journal and its associated Web page were collected. And second, a session was organized by Lutz Nover and Dieter Scharf to discuss a unified nomenclature for plant heat stress transcription factors and their functional modules. An agreement was reached among the participants which