We began by trying to obtain suitable human placentas for culture, from the obstetrical facility at the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, which was part of the UC Medical School. After several culture failures, I was told that these placentas were inevitably slathered with tincture of green soap. Colleagues on the medical school faculty had already cornered the supply of ''clean'' placentas from voluntary hysterectomies. The alternative was monkey kidney. Dr. Bergdoll maintained a colony of approximately 100 rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta), which were used in detecting staphylococcal enterotoxins and determining the mode of enterotoxin pathogenesis. After a few experiments, an animal would become refractory to the enterotoxin and of no further use to that project. We arranged to purchase these ''alumni'' as kidney donors. We then learned from experience that the monkey house had a high population of airborne yeasts, which would contaminate the kidneys collected in the animal facility and were resistant to our antibiotics. We had to collect the kidneys with their capsules intact and carry them back to the laboratory in a beaker of Dakin's solution (a strong, buffered solution of hypochlorite). At the laboratory, sterile saline was used to rinse away the hypochlorite before the capsules were opened. The kidneys were relatively small and costly, and so we tried culturing the medullas along with the corticesit did not work. Thereafter, the cortices were dissected off of the kidneys and used as the sole source of tissue for primary culture. One of the medical school faculty members routinely harvested the primary cultures and made secondary cultures to amplify the supply obtained from one monkey. Our trials of this method did not yield the desired results, and so we simply digested the tissue as extensively as possible, obtaining enough cells to produce 200-240 of 25-cm 2 cultures (in styrene flasks) from one monkey. Cultures were also grown in 16 9 150 mm test tubes (in slanted racks that confined the medium and the cells near the butt of the tube) and in Leighton tubes, which contained a coverslip near the butt end, on which the cells were grown to provide superior microscopic imaging. Our methods were later described in detail (Cliver and Herrmann 1969) , as well as a machine for changing the medium in the cultures during their outgrowth period (Cliver 1973a) . Our research at UC was funded by food industry donations to FRI and a small grant from the US Public Health Service. My application to renew the grant was unsuccessful.