MBoC celebrates its first 20 years

This year Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBoC) celebrates its first 20 years as the American Society for Cell Biology's (ASCB's) science journal. The cover of this special anniversary issue shows 20 different organisms to highlight the diversity of the cell biology featured in our pages and to affirm our belief that studies of diverse organisms make the understanding of cell biology richer and more complete, and accelerate progress in the field. Throughout the year, MBoC has published 28 brief articles under the title “MBoC 20th Anniversary Favorite.” These are tributes submitted by ASCB members to highlight their favorite articles from MBoC's first 20 volumes. While the MBoC home page (www.molbiolcell.org) has links to lists of the most-read and the most-cited MBoC articles based on numerical data, the Favorite format provided individuals the opportunity to identify MBoC articles that had a particularly meaningful and enduring impact on the authors’ biological fields. The MBoC 20th Anniversary Favorites are being collected in a special printed volume to be distributed at the ASCB Annual Meeting. You will also find in this issue fascinating ASCB Award Essays, which provide personal accounts of scientific careers, discoveries, and lives outside science, written by this year's ASCB award winners, all of whom are highly esteemed cell biologists. In other important essays, Tom Pollard thoughtfully retraces the ASCB's history of political advocacy, and David Botstein makes a powerful case for the importance of maintaining strong government support for basic biology research. Finally, included in this volume are invited articles by Peter Sorger, Douglas Robinson, and Margaret Gardel, all leaders in the areas of two Threads woven into the 2012 ASCB program. When program chair Tony Hyman and ASCB president Ron Vale organized this year's meeting, they introduced Threads on Cell Biology and Medicine and Cell Biology and the Physical Sciences as themes that run through the meeting. The Perspective articles published in this volume amplify these themes. Looking forward to MBoC's next 20 years, we will continue to operate under the virtuous principles and practices wisely established by our founding editor-in-chief, David Botstein. Specifically, authors and readers can count on the highest standards of scientific quality and reporting and on integrity in peer review, with an emphasis on the word “peer.” As the ASCB's science journal, MBoC will continue to embody the values and the research and education missions of the society. Because we are the ASCB's journal, our electronic table of contents is delivered to essentially all 9000-plus ASCB members, ensuring that articles published in MBoC are highly visible to the most appropriate target audience. All manuscripts will continue to be handled exclusively by editors who are working scientists dedicated to advancing the field of cell biology. This year, we bolstered and diversified our already outstanding team of associate editors by adding editors with expertise in Drosophila (Denise Montell and Richard Fehon), Caenorhabditis elegans (Susan Strome and Jeff Hardin), intermediate filaments (Thomas Magin), and noncoding RNAs (Sandra Wolin). In an ongoing effort to provide thoughtful, timely Feature articles of interest and importance to the cell biology community, we have expanded to three our team of features editors. William Bement and Keith Kozminski will now be working with Doug Kellogg in this capacity. I thank all of the authors who contributed to this volume for taking the time to share their wisdom in the articles they wrote, and all members of the MBoC editorial board for their dedicated service. I thank Stephanie Kriston, Mark Leader, and Johnny Chang for collecting and arranging the images on the cover; Eric Baker and Mark Leader for overseeing the production and copyediting of this volume; and Doug Kellogg, William Bement, and Keith Kozminski for commissioning and editing the articles. David Drubin, Editor-in-Chief