LAUSR

For most, 2020 will be a year to remember for all that has gone wrong. Before the coronavirus disease outbreak early this year (COVID-19), the last vestiges of what meetings were supposed to be came to an abrupt halt by summer, despite futile efforts to jumpstart the many conferences already embedded in the calendar. No more meetings of the non-virtual variety would materialize for the remainder of the year. And the dawning of the ZOOM era soon brought forth our collective veiled efforts to retain or reestablish the meeting experience by sitting in front of a computer monitor for hours on end, much to the chagrin of conference sponsors and organizers wishing for something a bit more interactive. This one dimension of science as we knew it changed in the year 2020, as did so much else! Reflecting back on a year that has turned out to be about as eventful as one could imagine is entirely appropriate at this juncture. Evenwith vaccines on the horizon, the world entered and persists in an altered state, while the fragile nature of our species retains center stage as SARS CoV-2 pushed the tenets and substance of the modern contemporary biomedical enterprise to its limits. Despite the accrued technological bravado thought to have had a global coalition to draw strength from, the so-called scientific meritocracy came crashing down for countries like the USA in response to the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic. For our specialized community of reproductive medicine and biology, a mixed bag of outcomes has obtained in human ARTs and reproductive genetics due to the repositioning and adaptation of our specialty against a backdrop of safety and patient care commanded by the COVID era. Practicing social distancing, respectfully quarantining as need be, and following whatever precautions and directives coming from our professional societies, despite delays, our patients eventually got back on the tread mill to pregnancy in most IVF clinics. And the basic science and clinical research in our discipline continued to strike tones of progress like few other years before the COVID-19 pandemic. For journal editors, the spike in submissions witnessed this year is but one sentinel of how the change in lifestyle affected the world of science, for the better we hope. And possibly one of the brightest notes struck this year in the world of science was the announcement of the Nobel prize for chemistry being awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their groundbreaking discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing machinery [1]. How their seminal work and the broader implications of gene editing for the future of reproductive medicine will impact our field is the topic tackled in the commentary by Pavlovic and colleagues in this month’s issue (Altered evolution: are reproductive endocrinology and infertility specialists ready for the genetically engineered future? https://doi.org/10.1007/s10815020-01963). Having the difficult conversations bridging the potential interplay between gene editing and the field of ARTs is only a matter of time as science and society begin to forge a new alliance in the face of the troublesome year endured by the hopeful and hopeless alike. Saltations of the do this and do not do that ilk have sprinkled the ART agenda in 2020 just as has been the case throughout its history. For example, a foundational principle of our efforts to send patients home with a child has always aimed at understanding the role of the uterine endometrium in time and space for the process of implantation. Tracing a bit of the 70-year history of the endometrium in reproductive medicine, we encourage our readership to have a look at Harvey Kliman’s retrospective last month in Fertility and Sterility * David F. Albertini [email protected]