My effort to use synchronously dividing cultures to examine the Escherichia coli cell
cycle involved a 10-year struggle with failure after failure punctuated by a few gratifying
successes, especially at the end. In this essay, I recount my personal journey in
this obsessive experimental pursuit. That narrative is followed by a description of a
simplified version of the “baby machine,” a technique that was developed to obtain
minimally disturbed, synchronously growing E. coli cells. Subsequent studies with this
methodology led to an understanding of the basic properties of the relationship between
chromosome replication and cell division. Accordingly, I end this reminiscence with a
simple, fool-proof graphical strategy for deducing the pattern of chromosome replication
during the division cycle of cells growing at any rate.