  I review a recent work on gauged flavor with left-right symmetry, where all
masses and all Yukawa couplings owe their origin to spontaneous flavor symmetry
breaking. This is suggested as a precursor to a full understanding of flavor of
quarks and leptons. An essential ingredient of this approach is the existence
of heavy vector-like fermions, which is the home of flavor, which subsequently
gets transmitted to the familiar quarks and leptons via the seesaw mechanism. I
then discuss implications of extending this idea to include supersymmetry and
finally speculate on a possible grand unified model based on the gauge group
$SU(5)_L\times SU(5)_R$ which provides a group theoretic origin for the
vector-like fermions.
