In our first major paper on Australia antigen (13) we described family clustering of Au in a Samaritan family from Israel which had been studied by the anthropologist Batsheva Bonné. From it we inferred the hypothesis that the persistent presence of Au was inherited as a simple autosomal recessive trait. The genetic hypothesis has proven to be very useful not in the sense that it is necessarily "true" (exceptions to the simple hypothesis were noted by us and others very soon), but because it has generated many interesting studies on the family distributions of responses to infection with hepatitis B.