Ross, Bailey, Hairston, Bradley, Michel, McDonald, are all names that will be recognized immediately by any epidemiologist/modeler working on eukaryotic parasites. Almost all of these people studied and published prior to 1971, beginning with Sir Ronald Ross who, I am sorry to say, rather feebly attempted to predict the prevalence of malaria in mathematical terms. Most investigators in this area would agree that the seminal publications for the modern epidemiology of helminth parasites were those of Crofton (1971a, b). His efforts were truly the ‘seeds’ for what followed. Harry Crofton, most unfortunately, died very young, not long in fact after publishing his two papers in 1971. I have often wondered what would have followed had he lived a longer life.

Early in my career, I had the pleasure of spending almost an entire year (1971–72) at Imperial College in London with Desmond Smyth, who was trying to teach me the intricacies of in vitro culture. He succeeded, but in doing so, I also learned that this sort of research is tedious, very expensive, and, frankly (for me, at least), terribly boring. It was about that time that I turned my complete attention to ecological pursuits.