Fifty years is a long time. In 1955 – the year IUB (later renamed IUBMB) was established – it was known that protein synthesis is associated with ribonucleoprotein particles, which are abundant in cytoplasm, and that the small RNAs – now called tRNAs – are also involved, but no one knew what a ‘ribosome’ was because the word had not yet been coined [1]. Macromolecular crystallography was also in a primitive state. In the previous year, Perutz and coworkers had shown that phases for protein diffraction patterns can be determined by heavy atom isomorphous replacement [2], but more than a decade was to elapse before the promise of this discovery was first fully realized and an atomic-resolution structure of a protein obtained.