Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2009
In this note it is shown that any ribbon link is a sublink of a ribbon link for which surgery on the longitudes gives a connected sum of copies of S1 x S2. In particular there are many links for which the analogue of the knot theoretic Property R fails, and sublinks of homology boundary links need not be homology boundary links. Higher dimensional analogues of these results are also given and it is shown that if n ≥ 2 the group of a ν-component ribbon n-link has a presentation of deficiency ν. Hence there are high dimensional slice knots which are not ribbon knots.