According to John Ellis:[5] "Mary K. [Gaillard], Dimitri [Nanopoulos] and I first got interested in what are now called penguin diagrams while we were studying CP violation in the Standard Model in 1976...
In the spring of 1977, Mike Chanowitz, Mary K and I wrote a paper on GUTs predicting the b quark mass before it was found.
When it was found a few weeks later, Mary K, Dimitri, Serge Rudaz and I immediately started working on its phenomenology.
Then, one evening, after working at CERN, I stopped on my way back to my apartment to visit some friends living in Meyrin where I smoked some illegal substance.
Later, when I got back to my apartment and continued working on our paper, I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins.