Michael B. Mathews Department of Medicine, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark, New Jersey 07103, USA Corresponding author: mathewsnjms.rutgers.edu

Terri and I met at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory nearly half a century ago as junior scientists in the James lab. Both of us were studying adenovirus. Our work was complementary and we wrote three papers together, dealing with viral genes that encoded regulatory proteins and RNAs. The last of these papers, coauthored with Elizabeth Moran, Rich Roberts, and Brad Zerler, was on gene expression and cellular transformation induced by products of the virus's E1A gene. It was published in the Journal of Virology in 1986. Three eventful years later, Terri was US Editor of Genes & Development, a role she has fulfilled in exemplary style for over a third of a century. Let me recount the events that led to her stewardship of G&D.

Terri took over the editorship from me in 1989, relieving me of the position I had held for about 2 years following the tragic and singularly untimely death of Steve Prentis. Steve founded G&D as a “journal devoted to the molecular analysis of gene expression in eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and viruses.” It was a joint venture with the Genetics Society of Great Britain, and Graham Bulfield was European …