"The disillusionment with QFT as a basis for the theory of elementary particles was also premature. What was missing was many ingredients, including the identification of the underlying gauge symmetry of the weak interactions, the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking that could explain how this symmetry was hidden, the identification of the fundamental constituents of the nucleons as colored quarks, the discovery of asymptotic freedom which explained how the elementary colored constituents of hadrons could be seen at short distances yet evade detection through confinement, and the identification of the underlying gauge symmetry of the strong interactions. Once these were discovered, it was but a short step to the construction of the standard model, a gauge theory modeled on QED, which opened the door to the understanding of mesons and nucleons."