40 Years Young

1974 will be remembered for many things: the resignation of Richard Nixon, ABBA’s victory at the Eurovision song contest, or even perhaps the invention of the Rubik’s cube. It also witnessed the launch of an upstart in the publishing world whose aim was to provide a focal point and shared purpose among the rapidly expanding community of cell and molecular biologists. We’ll spend this year commemorating the 40th birthday of this newcomer and the science that has appeared in its pages since. Given the passage of time, one might expect the articles in the first issue of Cell, published four decades ago this month, to seem as distant as old news stories from the era.