A tribute to Terri Grodzicker from an admirer
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Cell Biology and Development, the Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10065, USA
- Corresponding author: fuchs{at}rockefeller.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Over my career, now spanning some four decades, I've published 22 papers in Genes & Development. Terri Grodzicker has been the Editor for all of these. From my lab's first experience with G&D in 1989 to our most recent in 2022, Terri has always been both expeditious in handling our review process and thoughtful and fair in her judgment and decisions. In the publishing world, Terri stands out as someone who has exerted care and effort in working with authors to make their paper better during the course of the peer review process. The field of gene expression and development will miss Terri as she hands off the baton to a new Editor 2023.
When I first began my independent scientific career then at the University of Chicago, it was just at the cusp of the era of DNA technology. As an independent scientist, I took the first year to clone my first cDNAs, another year to work with my budding lab to sequence these clones, and still another year to isolate and sequence our first gene. By 1989, however, we were under way, and began to use our clones and genes to tackle developmental questions. As we did, we began to look for a forum to publish our emerging findings. In doing so, we sought out G&D, a fledgling journal established by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press just 2 years before. Rafi Kopan, then a graduate student in my group and now Director of Developmental Biology at University of Cincinnati Medical School, was the lead author of our first G&D paper, in which we used our keratin cDNAs and peptide-specific antibodies as tools to investigate determination, morphogenesis, and differentiation in skin (Kopan and Fuchs 1989). The work unveiled the importance of keratin 14 as a protein expressed by …
