Glyceroneogenesis, the pathway that almost wasn't.

"What seest thou else in the dark, backward abysm of time." Prospero in The Tempest As is true in all aspects of human endeavor, a scientific concept can appear before its time and remain unappreciated before events catch up with the concept. Such was the case of the discovery of glyceroneogenesis and the establishment of its biological importance; it took almost 40 years before the significance of this pathway became apparent and the concept of triglyceride recycling was understood by the scientific establishment. Even that may be stretching a point, because today glyceroneogenesis is hardly a household word. In this essay, we will tell the story of the discovery of glyceroneogenesis and the thought processes that led us to propose this pathway. We will also speculate on why the pathway was not more widely embraced by scientists working in lipid metabolism and why that may finally be changing. The reader is warned, however, that this story is a reconstruction of past events and, like all such attempts, suffers from the patina of nostalgia that inevitably covers all things resurrected from memory. Others may view things differently, but this is our story as we remember it.