A series of News & Views articles assesses the importance and lasting impact of 10 key papers from the Nature archive.

One of them is the 1975 Nature paper where the immunologists Georges Köhler and César Milstein described the production of monoclonal antibodies of predetermined specificity, each made by a continuously growing cell line that had been generated by the fusion of an antibody-producing cell from an immunized mouse with an immortal cancer cell specialized for antibody secretion.