The new technologies available in the biosciences have led to a renaissance of integrative, regulatory, and comparative physiology. These fields profit most from the exploitation of the animal models now available. Dr. John E. Hall (Jackson, Mississippi) shaped a very efficient editorial team that has performed extremely well during the previous years. The journal was directed at including very important new developments in physiology. In particular, much of the leading work done in the field of obesity was published during this time.

After two very successful terms, the editors changed in July 2001. Two of the previous associate editors, Dr. Granger and Dr. Lohmeier, continue to serve on the present editorial team. The focus of the journal has been extended to include more work from the rapidly growing fields of model organisms, functional genomics, development, and tissue plasticity. The statistics on the downloading of articles from our web site show that these articles are receiving much attention. Moreover, the reviewing process has been expedited. The time from submission to the first decision is now under four weeks. The average manuscript that is ultimately accepted for publication has been in the pipeline for only 76 days. These manuscripts are available as fully citable "Articles in Press" only a few days after acceptance.

Yes, the development of genetically modified animals has had the greatest impact. However, it is important to point out that all fields represented by our journal are receiving more citations. All of the sections are valuable and make the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology the journal it is.

The number of papers we publish will be somewhat less this year. Thus, for technical reasons, the very encouraging developments of our journal will be fully mirrored by the 2003 and 2004 impact factor.

We are in the fortunate situation that most fields covered by our journal are rapidly growing. The cutting-edge techniques have influenced all areas of physiology, although not evenly. In particular, integrative physiology is once more gaining popularity. In Chinese, the word "Physiology" consists of three characters: life, logic, study. After generating the vast amount of different animal models and deciphering the human genome, the study of this "logic of life" has become most important.

Publishing only the best work in the fields of regulatory, integrative, and comparative physiology.