Dear Editor,

In 1970, I returned from Rochester, MN, US, after completion of two and a half years of medical residency in Gastroenterology at the Mayo Clinic. Once in Mexico City, I divided my time as a consultant in Internal Medicine at the old Hospital de Enfermedades de la Nutrición (HEN), near downtown, during the mornings and pursued my research studies on the intestinal transport of urea, water, and electrolytes, in the new facilities of the Instituto Nacional de la Nutrición (INN) in the south of the city during the afternoon. During this very same year, a brand new research area, the “Mary Street Jenkins Research Unit”, was built, a complex of small buildings devoted to research. One of these buildings housed the Department of Biochemistry, where its chairman, Alberto Huberman, invited me to perform my studies in his laboratory, and I accepted his kind offer. At that time, Rubén Lisker, a well-known geneticist and hematologist in Mexico, was the Editor-in-Chief of the Revista de Investigación Clínica (RIC) and he used to send me for review several papers submitted for publication. I was, therefore, a regular reviewer for this journal.

A few years later, in December 1973, Rubén asked me if I were willing to help him as a coeditor of the RIC, which, as to that point, had never had that particular post. During the previous 25 years of continuous publication, the RIC had only had two Editors-in-Chief, José Baez-Villaseñor and Rubén Lisker. As a young physician, I considered this offer an honor that would give me the opportunity to learn more about the process of publishing and reviewing manuscripts on research studies, and also to work closely with one of the most promising investigators of the INN and Mexico. Nevertheless, at the same time, I thought of the hours that I would have to devote to this endeavor at an early stage of my career, and I was quite unsure about accepting the post. Eventually, I accepted and it turned out to be a wise decision. For the following 13 years, I helped Rubén in this task, leading the RIC to a very relevant position among the scientific journals in our country, and certainly in Latin America.

My last period as coeditor of the RIC came in July 1987, when a special issue was submitted to the journal for possible publication; this issue contained an extremely important series of articles related to HIV-AIDS and the experience of the INN in attending patients with this disease¹. The issue included 19 articles on the physiopathology, clinical, and radiologic features of the disease as well as immunological studies and the hepatic, pulmonary, gastrointestinal, hematologic, renal, and dermatologic abnormalities found in almost 100 patients with HIV-AIDS who were attended at the institute. When this special issue was published at the end of 1987, and with a specific permission from the General Director of the INN, Manuel Campuzano, I took a leave of absence that lasted 12 long years. I returned to the INN as a consultant at the Liver Clinic in 2001 when Donato Alarcón-Segovia was the new Director, and the RIC was a better medical journal than when I left the institute.