Rudolf Grosschedl Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, 79108 Freiburg, Germany Corresponding author: grosschedlie-freiburg.mpg.de

The rapid advances in the research of gene regulation and development in the 1980s, sparked by the cloning of key regulatory genes and functional analysis of cell type-specific gene expression, set the ground for establishing new journals for publishing. Discussions between the late Steve Prentis, Director of Publications at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Richard Flavell, then Senior Secretary of the Genetics Society of Great Britain, led to the launching of Genes & Development as a journal with offices in the U.S. and Europe. The recruitment of Terri Grodzicker as a full-time Editor enabled the fast and continuous success of G&D. Terri was an ideal choice because she had been running a successful lab and had shown excellent scientific judgement and broad knowledge. In addition, the association of the new journal with CSHL, as a site of prestigious research conferences, facilitated the success of this new journal, which ended up publishing some our best work.

When I set up my own lab in the late 1980s and attended some CSHL conferences, I met Terri and was impressed by her passion for science and grasp of important experiments. After postdoctoral work in David Baltimore's lab, I first sought to understand the basis for the cell type-specific expression of the immunoglobulin µ gene in transgenic mouse models. Having shown that the cell type-specific intragenic enhancer is instrumental for B-cell-specific µ gene expression in mice, we wanted to determine whether enhancers, known to be associated with transcriptional activation, can confer chromatin accessibility independent of the interaction with a RNA Pol II promoter. To this end, we introduced a gene construct—consisting of a small µ enhancer core fragment linked to a bacteriophage promoter—into the mouse germline. Subsequently, we assessed the accessibility of the …