Standing on shoulders.

This saying was already a popular metaphor in the middle ages, and still is. A contemporary meaning of this would be: one who discovers by building on discoveries made by predecessors. And in this issue of the European Respiratory Journal, CHANG et al. [1] have done exactly that. Appreciating and using the ideas of a classical physiological study [2], and combining this with the results of modern molecular biology they demonstrate how, at the crossroads of two completely different scientific fields, an added value is created that brings us forward in understanding one of the most fascinating phenomena in respiratory medicine: lung growth and repair.