What was the scientific context in which I wrote my 1975 “Inositol phospholipids and cell surface receptor function” review?

Abstract

50 years on from my BBA review, I was delighted to hear that many of the current leaders of research across “The Multiverse of Phosphoinositides” are contributing to an authoritative collection of articles on the current state of that cosmology of cell functions – and that three other inositidonauts who were launched from Birmingham are assembling it. When the phosphoinositidase C signalling pathway emerged into the cell regulation limelight during the early 1980s it drew attention to a family of metabolically atypical membrane phospholipids that most biologists had been comfortably ignoring. Looking back, it is remarkable how many important clues were already loitering in the literature, waiting for us to start to make sense of them in the 1970s.