During 2021 Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology is celebrating its 70th birthday. When it was founded in 1950 it was the only journal bridging between the physical and biological sciences and it was therefore a pioneer of this form of interdisciplinary publication. The situation today is very different. The journal now competes in an increasingly popular space. That is a tribute to the foresight of the founding Editors, John Butler and John Randall. They clearly saw this inter-disciplinarity between physics and biology as the future, and they were right. The detailed history of the journal all the way from those early years was published in 2018.

In 2018, the Editors wrote “The next decades promise to be an exciting period for integrative discovery in biophysics and molecular biology“ and said that we remain “dedicated to the synthesis of reduction and integration that has ’always’ been at the heart of the journal.”

Just a year ago, in February 2020, the Editors, the Editorial Board and the Publisher met for an exciting two-day face-to-face meeting in Amsterdam to plan out how to achieve these goals. Exciting, because it revealed great enthusiasm for identifying the areas and people who could be involved. We believe that the publications in the journal during 2021 will show the benefits of that meeting.

The first is to adopt the Graphical Review format as one of the acceptable formats for articles, particularly arising from symposia and congresses where the participants already have detailed slides from their presentations.

The second is to commission a series of articles in the form of retrospective reviews of Historic Classic articles from the first two decades of the journal.

Finally, we are also welcoming a New Co-Editor-in-Chief, Delphine Dean, recruited from the Editorial Board. Delphine Dean is the Ron and Jane Lindsay Family Innovation Professor in Bioengineering at Clemson University in the USA. Peter Kohl, meanwhile, is stepping down from that position in order to manage a leading role in a major multi-institute funding development in Germany. Both Tom Blundell and Denis Noble will continue with their roles of Co-Editors-in-Chief.

Learn more about plans for the journal going forward.