The carrier model for kinetics was introduced to account for the transport of sugars across sheep placenta [323] and human red blood cells [324]. The name “carrier” arose because the model should apply when the transporter collects the substrate on one side of the membrane and “carries” it across the membrane to deposit it on the other. This appears to be the actual physical mechanism for ion transport by low molecular weight ion carriers like nonactin and trinactin ([530, 541, 542] and probably valinomycin [530, 543–545]. However for much larger transporters such as GLUT1, it has always been much more likely that the physical mechanism is somewhat different. The essential feature of carrier kinetics is not transfer of the carrier molecule across the membrane, but rather the change in exposure of the binding site for the substrate. It must be possible for this site to be exposed on each side of the membrane, but not both at the same time. The structures of GLUT1 (see Fig. 12) and related transporters all indicate that there is a transport pathway through the molecule which is occluded or gated at one end or the other and furthermore suggest conformation changes that could close the gate at one end while opening the gate at the other.