Celebrating the 65th Anniversary of the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology

Abstract

It is with great pleasure that I share with you that in 2026, the American College of Clinical Pharmacology (ACCP) is celebrating the 65th anniversary of the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology (JCP). On behalf of the President of the College, the Officers, the Board of Regents, the Publications Committee, and ACCP Staff, the JCP Editorial Team will publish three special issues of the journal this year.

I would like to introduce the first two of these special issues to you in this editorial; in September, I will dedicate a separate editorial to the third. We believed that it would be important to highlight important achievements associated with JCP and therefore have dedicated one special issue to the papers that received the McKeen Cattell Award and another to celebrate the most cited papers. The latter will publish papers that have been cited 175–498 times since 2010.

With regard to the first special issue, I would like to provide additional information about Dr. McKeen Cattell, the first JCP editor.

McKeen Cattell, MD, PhD, FCP, studied as an undergraduate at Columbia and Cambridge Universities, graduating from Columbia in 1914. He subsequently received a PhD in physiology from Harvard in 1920 and graduated from Harvard Medical School before joining the Department of Physiology at Cornell University Medical College in 1924. In 1937, he became Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology, where, with the late Drs. Harry Gold (a clinician and researcher in the Department of Pharmacology at Cornell Medical College) and Nathaniel T. Kwit (a clinician at Cornell), he carried out important clinical investigations involving both animal and human subjects. These studies established a firm scientific basis for the efficacy of digitalis glycosides in congestive heart failure.

In the late 1940s, Dr. Cattell was part of a group of medical scientists who convinced the Federal Government of the importance of basic biomedical research. He later served in several key advisory roles for the National Institutes of Health and as an adviser to committees of the New York Academy of Medicine.

He served as the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics from 1946 to 1950 and retired from Cornell as Professor of Pharmacology Emeritus in 1959. Dr. Cattell continued contributing to the field of clinical pharmacology by founding the Journal of New Drugs in January 1961 and serving as its Editor for the next 6 years. In 1967, JCP was established by Dr. Cattell, who served as its Editor for 10 years.

In collaboration with his colleagues Drs. Kwit and Gold, along with Drs. Duncan Hutcheon and Philip Reichert, Dr. Cattell became a founding father of the American College of Clinical Pharmacology, which was legally incorporated on September 11, 1969. The Articles of Incorporation list Drs. Duncan E. Hutcheon, McKeen Cattell, and Harry Gold as the initial Board of Directors.

The objectives of ACCP were listed as “to promote and advance the science of clinical pharmacology and chemotherapy in all its phases; to establish high standards of clinical investigation in this field of endeavor; to issue publications for these purposes and to engage in other appropriate educational efforts.” JCP became the flagship publication of ACCP and has now served the global clinical pharmacology community for over 65 years as a peer-reviewed journal.

After his passing, in 1997, in acknowledgement of his extraordinary service as the first Editor of JCP and co-founder of ACCP, the McKeen Cattell Memorial Award was established. It is an annual honor recognizing an outstanding paper published in JCP.

I sincerely hope you will enjoy these two special issues, and I wish you a most rewarding reading experience!