Philippe Soriano Department of Cell, Developmental, and Regenerative Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, New York, New York 10029, USA Corresponding author: philippe.sorianomssm.edu

I first learned about Genes & Development when I was a postdoc in Rudolf Jaenisch's lab at the Whitehead Institute in 1987. At the time, the journal had just launched, and Rudolf suggested we submit a paper on a new retroviral insertional mouse mutant, Mov34. Fortunately, it was well reviewed and published that year (Soriano et al. 1987). It took me then a few years until I obtained enough data for a paper from my independent lab, but I was delighted when our first gene trap paper was accepted for publication in G&D with only minor revisions requested (Friedrich and Soriano 1991). My only disappointment was that Terri Grodzicker, who by then had taken on the position of Editor, turned down our submission for a cover image. It had taken us quite a long time to get the three Spock embryos, subsequently shown to carry a mutation in the Sec8 gene (Friedrich et al. 1997), to sit still in PBS for them to be photographed (shown here). Terri claimed that these embryos would scare off the readership (and also muttered something about suitability of animal research for the cover…), but I was never convinced by these arguments. This remains to date a major disappointment, especially since our work was rarely featured as a cover image despite quite a few of our papers being published in the journal over the years…

Three Spock embryos, harboring a gene trap insertion in the Sec8 gene and leaning precariously against each other. This image was rejected as a possible cover for an issue of G&D.

In 1992, I was …