IN recent years there has been much interest in the role of crystals in causing acute attacks of gout. Faires and his colleagues at Philadelphia1 and Seegmiller et al. at Bethesda2 were able to produce such attacks by injecting microcrystalline sodium monourate into gouty and non-gouty volunteers. With this experiment in mind, investigations were undertaken, at cellular and sub-cellular level, of events that may be important in initiating the inflammatory phenomenon in acute gout.