renormalized by medium polarization effects (structure), also meant the end of superconductivity as a wide open, speculative field and the beginning of a thoroughly quantitative "exact" era, with uncertainties below the 10% level.From this vantage point of view it is not difficult to argue that important progress in the understanding of pairing in atomic nuclei will arise from a systematic, quantitative study of two-particle transfer reactions on drip line, exotic, halo nuclei (like for example 11 Li), stabilized by the pairing correlations associated with a single Cooper pair, as well as on many (but still few)-Cooper pair systems like e.g. the Sn-isotopes, setting equal emphasis on the structure as well as on the reaction aspects of the process. Time seems ripe for such a study, in keeping with the fact that one now knows how to correlate pairs of nucleons taking properly into account the interplay between bare and medium polarization (induced) nuclear pairing interactions. Also how to calculate the absolute value of the twoparticle transfer cross sections taking properly into account the full non-locality of the Cooper pairs, as well as the multistep (successive, simultaneous and nonorthogonality) contributions to it. The above expectation is strongly supported by the results emerging from the analysis of a broad sample of two-nucleon transfer data.In particular, from the analysis of recent data from (p, t) reactions on 11 Li and Sn-isotopes, carried out making use of a unified nuclear field theoretical description of structure and reaction mechanisms, which testify to the fact that theory is now able to provide an overall account of the experimental findings, in particular of the absolute two-particle transfer cross section, within experimental errors and without adjusting any free parameter. This is also true when the multistep theory of two-particle transfer together with detailed, microscopic, nuclear structure wavefunctions is applied to (t, p) and ( 16 O, 18 O) data associated with the 206 Pb(gs) 208 Pb(gs) processes.