The very early history of sialic acid research has been reviewed by pioneers who were intimately engaged in creating it. The interested reader is referred to those accounts for the flavor and excitement of discovery in breaking open a field of research that now has come to fruition. Of particular historical interest are the summations published by Blix working in Sweden (Blix et al., 1955), Zilliken working in the United States (Zilliken and Whitehouse, 1958), and Gottschalk working in Germany (Gottschalk, 1960).