Interstellar Grains: 50 Years On
  Our understanding of the nature of interstellar grains has evolved
considerably over the past half century with the present author and Fred Hoyle
being intimately involved at several key stages of progress. The currently
fashionable graphite-silicate-organic grain model has all its essential aspects
unequivocally traceable to original peer-reviewed publications by the author
and/or Fred Hoyle. The prevailing reluctance to accept these clear-cut
priorities may be linked to our further work that argued for interstellar
grains and organics to have a biological provenance - a position perceived as
heretical. The biological model, however, continues to provide a powerful
unifying hypothesis for a vast amount of otherwise disconnected and disparate
astronomical data.
