At the beginning of next year, Development's Editorial team will change. Jim Smith will take over as Editor in Chief.FIG1
Looking back over my own fifteen years as Editor in Chief, the amount of change has been staggering. Development's short life began in 1987 when it was relaunched from the Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology. Since then, the field has seen the unification of many, if not all, model systems, into a framework that links evolution, development and medicine to an extent that only the most optimistic could have imagined in 1987. The first paper, in the first issue, of Development(Smith, 1987) showed that an unidentified factor in a tissue culture medium induced animal caps fromXenopus embryos to form mesoderm. It seems hard to imagine we didn't know this in 1987, because now all the major signaling molecules that are involved...
