Ellis Reinherz and I were riding in a luxury Boston Coach to Long Island in New York State driven by a professional driver.This was not a vacation trip to one of the best leisure places in the United States.We were heading toward the National Laboratory at Brookhaven,where a powerful X-ray source is available in a facility called a synchrotron.The aim of our trip was to use a strong X-ray to shoot the crystals of the T cell receptor (TCR) we had just managed to grow after considerable effort for three-dimensional structure determination.In 1996,this was one of the hottest projects in structural biology as well as in immunology.