EMBO Molecular Medicine: Conquering new frontiers

Matthias W. Hentze Matthias Hentze is a Senior Editor of the Journal and is at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. European Molecular Biology Laboratory Dear colleagues, I am excited by the launch of EMBO Molecular Medicine, which marks a new era in the activities of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). The Journal offers a new vehicle for exploration of one of the most promising frontiers in the life sciences. At the same time, for me personally, it also completes a circle with regard to my scientific interests. After training in the 1980s as a medical doctor (with the aim of becoming a hepatologist), I became—at a time when medicine was still more an ‘empirical art’ than a hard science— more and more fascinated by the power of molecular biology.My fascination took me deeply into mechanistic molecular aspects of (post-transcriptional) gene regulation, and considerably further away from medicine than I had anticipated. However, with a growing appreciation of the potential of ‘Molecular Medicine’, I benefited from astute observations made in ‘the clinic’ that gave rise to new and important insights into basic mechanisms of gene regulation. b-Thalassaemia and nonsensemediated (mRNA) decay as well as thrombophilia and altered mRNA 30end processing are personal examples of discoveries that emerged from ‘the clinic’ rather than from the study of model systems.