From the beginning of his career Stjepan Marcelja has made seminal, profoundly deep, succinct contributions to numerous fields: superconductivity, liquid crystals, membrane biophysics, colloid science, molecular forces and water structure, self assembly of biological molecules, solution theory, neural nets and artificial intelligence. Invariably these contributions are highly original, have immediate impact and have stood the test of time. Almost all of his papers mark the beginning of a whole rich new field of scientific endeavour, whether in the biological or physical sciences.