It was an extremely humid and sticky day in Houston when, in 2005, Rakesh Kumar, the head of the lab where I worked on the molecular mechanisms underlying the actions of oestrogens on cytoskeleton remodelling and cell migration came by my bench. He brought to me a newly published paper in Cell, “Role of endocytosis in cellular uptake of sex steroids”, saying that the results described therein would be the future of the field.