100 years of Immunology & Cell Biology

It is a special honor to be penning an editorial to introduce our final issue this year, the 100th years of publication of Immunology & Cell Biology.

I am hardly alone among Australian and New Zealand immunologists in having a special place in my heart for Immunology & Cell Biology. The journal was founded 100 years ago in Adelaide as the Australian Journal of Experimental Biology and Medical Science but became Immunology & Cell Biology more recently under Ieva Kotlarski in 1987. I first studied immunology at the University of Adelaide in Ieva's last years prior to retirement, although by that time the journal had moved over to Canberra under Chris Parish's leadership. My career followed that of Immunology & Cell Biology, as I moved for my PhD in Chris Goodnow's lab to the John Curtain School of Medical Research, with the Parish lab just down the hallway. ICB was ubiquitous, with all students and staff receiving the monthly issue in their pigeonhole, making it one of the few journals that everyone flicked through the pages of. One of my very first papers found its home in ICB,¹ in a field on which I am still working today.

A special moment for me in my early career came through Chris Parish's request for me to review a paper for ICB. Reviewing papers with my supervisor was a common enough request, but a request direct to me, as a PhD student, felt entirely different, it was a moment where I felt that perhaps I was also a professional scientist. I will be forever grateful to Chris for being so inclusive of early career researchers, a theme which I hope to continue for the journal. I later served on the editorial board under Chris, and as Deputy Editors under Gabrielle Belz, at the pivotal point where Gabrielle created the sister journal Clinical & Translational Immunology.² I took a few years out from ICB service, in anticipation of a professional move to Cambridge, but when the opportunity arose to apply for Editor-in-Chief I thought “where better to invest my service time than in the journal that supported my early career.” I rejoined as Deputy Editor under Anne La Flamme, and observed her boundless energy, before taking up the EiC position myself earlier this year.

What magnificent timing! To be Editor-in-Chief as we enter our 100th year! I must say, I thought I knew ICB well, but my decades of interaction with the journal barely scratched the surface of its history. It wasn't until this year, preparing for our centenary, that I realized how profoundly ICB has shaped immunology, at a personal, national and international level. Early editors are mythical figures in Australian immunology – many current immunologists (including myself) were trained under the CJ Martin Fellowship, named after one of our early Editors-in-Chief, while Derrick Rowley, EiC decades later, founded the Australian Society for Immunology (precursor to today's Australian and New Zealand Society of Immunology). As for the content published in ICB over the decades… I may be biased, but I think few, if any, journals have so profoundly influenced the basic tenants of immunology. From the clonal selection theory under MacFarlane Burnet³ to findings on pox immunization by Frank Fenner⁴ (culminating in his leadership of Smallpox eradication), from Don Metcalf's colony-forming assay⁵ to Ken Shortman's density gradient centrifugation,⁶ our journal laid the foundation of immunology. ICB's contributions hardly stopped there – Gus Nossal's work on germinal center formation,⁷ Kevin Lafferty's “two signal hypothesis,”⁸ the generation of OT-II transgenic mice,⁹ or the invention of the CFSE method for lymphocyte proliferation¹⁰ – all published first in ICB.

I am barely scratching the surface of ICB's contribution over the past 100 years, but fortunately we have an entire issue to explore contributions. Our lead article goes through the personalities and history of this 100 years,¹¹ and I promise is a fascinating read. If you want to read more about a particular era, we have more detailed articles on the early,¹² middle¹³ and modern¹⁴ periods. Take a look if you want to know more about how ICB grew on the back of WWII submarines blockading international shipping, or how Mark Mitchell was able to convince NHMRC to fund paper supplies during rationing.

In this issue, we also take a deep dive into some of the key personalities who made the journal what it is today – including Kevin Lafferty,¹⁵ Bede Morris,¹⁶ Margaret Baird,¹⁷ Dora Lush¹⁸ and Allan William Cripps.¹⁹ We also have a fascinating interview with the editorial team that makes everything happen at ICB – a must for anyone interested in how journals work behind-the-scenes.²⁰ Finally, we focus on just a few of the key areas where ICB has made history – in tumor immunology,²¹ veterinary immunology²² and clinical immunology.²³

I hope you enjoy reading this very special issue of ICB as much as we have enjoyed putting it together.

Adrian Liston is the Editor in Chief of Immunology & Cell Biology.