This talk serves as an introduction to the Heavy-Flavor session of the XXXIII International Symposium on Multiparticle Dynamics. A major focus of this session is on the production of heavy quarks. The talks which follow review the latest results on heavy quark production in strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions, as well as some of the physics of the heavy quarks themselves. This talk emphasizes what we can learn from the production measurements, both about underlying QCD theory and the partonic nature of the hadrons which we see in the laboratory.

PACS numbers: 12.38.-t, 12.38.Qk, 13.15.+g, 13.60.-r