This was not a surprising conclusion because all living organisms share a common ancestor. However, we did not know how conserved the machinery would be. We did not know that a newly sequenced gene from nearly any organism would be seen to fit into a family of proteins like kinases, myosins, or anthranylate synthetases. Indeed, the molecular conservation of many of the proteins involved in the cell cycle and in cell cycle checkpoints is not very evident across the rokaryotic/eukaryotic boundary but within eukaryotes the conservation is striking.