by George O'Toole — I have stud­ied bac­te­r­ial biofilms since I joined Roberto Kolter's lab at Har­vard Med­ical School in 1995. I "dis­cov­ered" biofilms as I was fin­ish­ing my grad­u­ate work at Wis­con­sin and con­tin­ued track­ing the lit­er­a­ture back­wards af­ter I joined Roberto's lab. The old­est ref­er­ence I could find was from the 1920s – a Navy re­port on hull bio­foul­ing cited in an­other pa­per I had read.