Ed has a new first author review – ‘Ribosome heterogeneity: from form to function‘ published with co-authors Marko Jovanovic (Columbia U.) and Nikolai Slavov in Trends in Biochemical Sciences. In it we review the evidence in favor of the existence of functionally specialized ribosomes, and discuss the approaches and tests that will allow confirmation of the specialized ribosome hypothesis. The review was previously made available as a preprint.