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.
In the second half of February the impending Giotto encounter of 13 March concentrated our minds on what the encounter might reveal. As an outcome, we issued a fairly widely circulated preprint with the title Some Predictions on the Nature of Comet H
alley, (1 March, 1996, Cardiff Series 121) whose contents were reported in the issue of the Times for 12 March. This publication in the Times was fortunate for us, because it appeared indisputably ahead of the encounter, whereas a contemporaneous submission to the Royal Astronomical Society has suffered long delays to acceptance on advice to the Society from two persons of unknown identities.
