I have read Michael Rossmann's oral history related to picornavirus structure with great interest. I would like to make it clear that my data of which there was a substantial pile were well organized long before I met Barbara Sherry at the 1985 Philadelphia meeting [see Nature (1983) 301, 674; Nature (1983) 304, 459; J. Gen. Virol. (1985), 66, 1159, and the Proceedings of the Philadelphia meeting 'Virus attachment and entry into cells', edited by R L Crowell and K Lonberg-Holm, ASM publications 1986, where my paper was submitted within seconds of my arrival]. Polio suffered from its peculiar antigenic properties. Most of the monoclonal antibodies against type 2 and type 3 are against a site which is not normally seen at all in type 1. This is hard to believe for such similar viruses and the field fell into a morass of peptides thought to be an easier way of analyzing antigenic and immunogenic sites. In fact it was seriously misleading. Thus those doing it the hard way were felt to be seriously misinterpreting their data at the time (peptides right, mutants wrong) but are now clearly thought by Michael to have seriously misinterpreted their data in an entirely different way (mass of unorganised data, etc). My own view, which is obviously correct but unfortunately not widely accepted, is that the strange imbalance in immunogenicity in the virus (which is not seen to the same extent in rhinovirus) has major effects on the pathogenesis and epidemiology of polio and the type specific distribution of disease, and is therefore of absolutely no interest to x-ray crystallographers. Peptides still have their keen advocates in Foot and Mouth Disease Virus as well as in HIV and prions. This is also profoundly depressing. To read about the determination of the structure of poliovirus go to http://medicine.wustl.edu/~virology/hogle.htm