Again and again I come up against the greatness of one single man. William Clouser Boyd (1903-1983) appears to be one of those fascinating people who go on to dominate an entire area of research for a generation. It seems as if his creativity knew no bounds. In the 1940’s Boyd noticed that the protein agglutinin in lima bean would agglutinate red cells of human blood group A but not those of O or B; he had in fact discovered that many of these blood agglutinins were actually specific to one blood group or another. With Elizabeth Shapely he coined their modern-day name, lectins, which is Latin for “to pick or choose.”