At the end of 2003, Professor Philipp Heitz (Fig. 1) resigned from his position as member of the Board of Managing Editors of the journal. He had been associated with Virchows Archiv as managing editor for 5 years, having been first invited to become a reviewer for Virchows Archiv B in 1994, when Ulrich Pfeifer was the editor of that journal. As managing editor, he was mainly responsible for manuscripts dealing with endocrine pathology. We are deeply indebted to him for his many years of dedicated service to the journal and we are happy that he is going to stay on as member of the editorial board.