In an era when science consists too often of armies of researchers using similar techniques to pursue almost identical objectives, it was refreshing to be reminded in this Horizon programme that real advances in biology and medicine start often enough as embryonic ideas in the mind of just one person - ideas which attract little attention or even ridicule from the cognoscenti of the day. Such of course was the fate of Semmelweiss when he proposed in the last century that bacteria transmitted from person to person might be a potent cause of disease, and such might have been the fate of Andrew Wyllie and Alastair Currie had not the current revolution in molecular biology gone some considerable way to proving the merit of their …