But as you'll find out in this story, my links to the Company go way back - I published my first ever paper in @dev-journal.bsky.social soon after my then boss @mjafreeman.bsky.social joined the Board of Directors, and my joining the Company is all thanks to @the-node.bsky.social.

And choose BiO for your next paper - if we send it for peer review, you can expect to receive your decision, with high-quality peer review reports, in around 10 days.

If you want to get involved, we’re always keen to recruit more potential reviewers - you can sign up here: www.biologists.com/bio-fast-and....

…but the cover letter was often helpful to put the work in the bigger context.

Rita and Alejandro have pretty much covered it! Many years back, when I was handling papers myself, I used to read the article before I read the cover letter so I could make my own mind up about the study rather than be influenced by any spin from the authors…

It’s no underestimate to say that he founded a whole field of biology - reprogramming - and his influence on the #devbio field and community has been enormous. He’ll be sorely missed, but his legacy will live on.

I understand the regulatory hurdles, and the importance of respecting individual choices, but surely we can do better than this to provide vital material to support research that should - amongst other things - improve the outcome of IVF treatments in the long term.

As someone who cares deeply about advancing our understanding of human dev, and who's been through IVF myself, I found this stat particularly depressing: "In the UK alone, more than 170,000 embryos were discarded in 2019, yet fewer than 1% – a total of only 675 embryos – were donated to research"