The curtain is still going up

The golden cover for this edition was selected to commence our celebration of the 50th year of publication of the journal TRANSFUSION. Under the sponsorship of the American Association of Blood Banks (now named the AABB), the journal began its journey with an editorial in its first edition in January-February 1961 entitled “The Curtain Rises.” Although the editorial is unsigned, we must assume that it was written by Tibor Greenwalt, the initial editor of the journal, whose service set the path for five additional editorial regimes: Rosenfield, Langdell, Zuck, McCullough, and me as the current and fortunate inhabitant of the chair. The initial editorial defends the decision to publish “yet another journal” against concerns that “I can't even keep up with the existing ones” and worries that “There is too much unnecessary publication now.” These 50-year-old concerns seem amusing and almost quaint, in view of how the journal has grown the past half-century in volume and preeminence. The volume expansion is probably easier to quantify; Volume 1 had 418 pages printed on paper that was 7 × 9½ inches in obvious contrast to Volume 49, which contains 2680 pages on 8 × 11-inch paper. Preeminence is more difficult to quantify but most of our readership will acknowledge that TRANSFUSION has become the journal in the broad field of transfusion medicine with the highest impact factor and is widely understood to be the best recognized journal in the world's literature with an exclusive transfusion focus. It is also difficult to measure the expansion of our readership with the move to Internet publishing and reading that was clearly not anticipated by our editorial forefathers. Some facets of the journal have remained constant. The initial goals were to “publish original papers dealing with all phases of clinical transfusion problems, technics, blood preservation, and blood group-immunology, genetics, and anthropology.” Although these topics still remain a mainstay of our editorial charges and challenges, our expansion into areas such as blood management, therapeutic apheresis, cellular therapies, and tissue transplantation was not anticipated 50 years ago. Another area of constancy is maintaining the promise of Dr Greenwalt that “the editorial staff promises to discriminate against everyone regardless of previous reputation or present exalted status and will return, for revision by the authors, manuscripts which do not meet the necessary high standards.” I am sure that our current readership understands that behind the friendly façade of the editors, editorial board, and journal staff lies a despotic belief that we need to maintain our quality by occasional bouts of curmudgeonly behavior. Clearly TRANSFUSION in its evolving format is very different from its initial start, as transfusion medicine has evolved from a mostly laboratory-based discipline to a multifocused laboratory and clinical field touching on most areas of medical practice. To commemorate these many changes and the 50th anniversary of publication, we will initiate a new feature this year. I have asked the associate editors, members of our editorial board, our past editors, and AABB staff members to help us celebrate our anniversary with a series of special articles in honor of this occasion. Since the early editions of TRANSFUSION were heavily involved with blood groups, our first offering will be a review of blood groups past, present, and future by Marion Reid and Geoff Daniels. George Garratty will provide a review of where we have been and where we are going in the field of immunohematology, a field that saturated the early editions of the journal and which continues to grow prominently in the journal in unpredicted ways with evolving emphasis on the HLA system, platelet antigens, and immunogenetics. Since the early editions also featured much of the work of that period in diagnosis and treatment of hemolytic disease of the newborn, I have asked Ron Strauss to provide a perspective on this topic from the early days to the present, helping us to learn how early cases that were reported in the journal formed the basis for future developments in the laboratory and the clinic. Toward the middle of our anniversary year, we will switch the emphasis of these special articles to other topics that began to be featured more prominently in the 1970s and 1980s or the middle of our reign. We will feature an article by Jim Aubuchon and Sunny Dzik on clinical transfusion medicine from the early days of TRANSFUSION. We will follow their assessment with an article by Nancy Heddle describing where we have been and where we should go in clinical investigation in our broadening field. Mike Busch will provide a review of transfusion-transmitted diseases with some hindsight from earlier journal volumes and forward thinking about where we might be going in this area. Since regulation and compliance issues became more prominent in this middle portion of the journal's life span, Karen Shoos Lipton will provide an overview of these topics as they affect AABB and its journal TRANSFUSION. During the final months of our anniversary celebration, we will feature papers by Bruce McLeod on the field of therapeutic apheresis with some thoughtful discussion of areas where the indications for therapy remain unclear and Ed Snyder on the role of the journal on cellular therapy. We will also present contributions on the evolution and future paths of blood donor centers and transfusion services by Jay Menitove and Chris Hillyer. This later group of special articles will focus on more recent developments in the field as chronicled by TRANSFUSION and offer some speculation about where the journal may be going in the future. We also anticipate a contemplative article by Jeff McCullough on innovation in transfusion medicine based on his many years of experience as our editor and leader in many aspects of the transfusion medicine discipline. Our celebration of 50 years of publication is a tribute to the wisdom of the AABB in establishing and supporting the journal's growth. Our growing diversity of topics is matched by the diversity of our authors, reviewers, and contributors. In the early days of Volume 1, the journal had a few articles from other English-speaking countries besides the United States (England, Canada, India) but more recent volumes feature almost 50% of accepted manuscripts from non-US authors. Our contributors also reflect the growing diversity of our professional training with contributions from physicians, research scientists, technologists, nurses, and administrator/executives. Fifty years ago, early TRANSFUSION readers who watched “The Curtain Rise” clearly could not have anticipated where the journal has gone during its lifetime. Since I cannot predict where the journal will move in the next 50 years, I believe that “The Curtain is Still Going Up,” and I do not expect to recognize an intermission or final act in my lifetime in the transfusion medicine profession. None.

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