I was disappointed with the recent article “Why did the chicken cross the road?” (December 2001, p. 26). Particularly, by the statement that the UK’s BBSRC-funded chicken EST project was “the first significant study of avian genomics.” This statement is not true and the article fails to acknowledge the USDA’s earlier efforts in competitive grants funding for more modest chicken EST sequencing projects at the University of Delaware (please see http://www.dbi.udel.edu/ news2000.html).