In William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear, the Earl of Gloucester is attacked by the king's enemies who, in Act III, Scene 7, proceed to gouge out Gloucester's eyes. Gloucester's servant exclaims: I'll fetch some flax, and whites of eggs,/To apply to his bleeding face. That raw egg white contains an anti-infective principle presumably was known to many persons of Shakespeare's day. Indeed, egg-laying creatures have been employing the principle for countless millenia. In 1944, microbiologists Arthur Schade and Leona Caroline observed that the antimicrobial action of the principle could be neutralized by iron [I]. The anti-infective factor subsequently was determined to be an 80 kDa ironbinding protein that is now termed ovotransferrin (OTf). The hen's egg, a perishable commodity in a semipermeable membrane within a fragile porous shell, is deposited in an environment heavily contaminated with bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. For thousands of years, hens successfully have employed the concept of ironwithholding defense to protect their precious legacy from infectious rot. The birds place a generous quantity of iron in the yolk for the developing embryo to use as a catalyst for DNA synthesis and for a variety of energy-yielding enzymatic systems. To prevent potential microbial invaders that migrate through the porous shell from obtaining lifeessential iron, the hens place none of the metal in the white, while including OTf as 12 percent of the solids. Moreover, OTffunctions best in an alkaline milieu, thus our biochemically erudite birds adjust the pH of the white to 9.5. When Schade and Caroline observed the great potency and very broad spectrum of the antimicrobial activity of OTf, they predicted that additional examples of host iron-withholding defense would be found.