When sperm meets egg-Fifty years of surprises

This memoir/perspective provides some of the back-stories of my half-century fascination with the meeting of sperm and egg. I describe how testing a hypothesis about cell division switched my interests to fertilization and how teaching an undergraduate course resulted in a serendipitous discovery that later led to major insights about sperm-egg recognition. I complete this look at the past with a brief description of the work of a small community of young scientists that provided major insights about the arousal of the egg by the sperm. I end speculating on unappreciated/neglected approaches that might lead to a new way of thinking about the initiation of development at fertilization.