The Aviation Medical Research Unit of the Department of Physiology (later to become the Aerospace Medical Research Unit), in turn, was inaugurated in 1960, under the joint auspices of the then Canadian Defence Research Board and the Department of Physiology. Geoffrey Melvill-Jones, then on the external scientific staff of the British Medical Research Council of the Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine, was appointed Director of the Unit in 1961 (he was to be elected Felow of the Royal Society of London in 1979), in which capacity he remained till 1988 when he was succeeded by D.G.D. Watt. The main thrusts of this Unit’s basic and applied research programs have always been directed towards investigations concerned with the adaptive properties od vestibular, oculomotor and spinal motor mechanisms, with particular emphases on the cause of-and the problems arising from sensory disorientation. Many pioneering insights and discoveries have emerged from these endevours, and it should be pointed out that – largely under Watt’s direction and stewartship – the Unit has emerged as an active component of the American, European and Canadian Space Programs.