Celebrating the first 60 years of The Journal of Cell Biology

Abstract

Much has changed in the last 60 years since a group of scientists at the then Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research broke ground on what would become The Journal of Cell Biology. Today, centrifuges and microtomes can be ordered with a few clicks of a mouse rather than arduously built and honed by hand. Electron microscopy data are now stored in gigabyte or terabyte digital files instead of on two-dimensional glass plates. And of course, the molecular biology revolution beginning in the 1970s and the subsequent genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic analyses performed over the last two decades have dramatically expanded the questions that can be asked, and provided the means to obtain a deeper mechanistic understanding of cellular processes.