Stephen J. Elledge Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA Corresponding author: selledgegenetics.med.harvard.edu

I am delighted to participate in this celebration of Terri Grodzicker and her role as the Editor of Genes & Development. Soon after I began publishing in G&D, I came to admire her as a skilled Editor and a keen observer of the human condition. Beyond her role as Editor of G&D, Terri played many other important roles at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: as a lab head, as an organizer of the many meetings at CSHL with David Stewart, and currently as the Dean of Academic Affairs, among others. In order to understand G&D, it is important to understand Terri's scientific history because it shaped her view of science, and that, in turn, shaped G&D. Terri obtained her PhD during the golden era of bacterial genetics, at which time she worked on polarity in the lac operon at Columbia University. She went on to a postdoctoral position with Jon Beckwith at Harvard Medical School, where she studied the roles of adenylate cyclase and the CAP protein in both bacteriophage λ latency and lac operon repression. She then went on to CSHL, where she made the leap into mammalian biology by studying eukaryotic viral genetics first with Joe Sambrook and then as a Staff Scientist at CSHL, where she led a group studying adenovirus and SV40 genetics and their roles in cancer. This background in the rigors of bacterial genetics and eukaryotic systems provided her with a wide breadth of experiences. That—in addition to being embedded into the scientifically rich environment of CSHL, steeped in the history of molecular biology—put her in the perfect position to oversee one of the most prestigious journals in the biological sciences.

Of course, I knew nothing about all that when I first came in contact with Terri indirectly through my …