Photographing the most prominent people in the world comes with a particular set of challenges. You have to negotiate with latter-day Praetorian guards determined to control and limit your access to your subject. You also need the self-awareness to see past your subject’s public image to find his or her essence. As the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung famously observed, “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

Five times Nadav Kander has shot TIME cover stories, in 2010 photographing the new-minted British Prime Minister David Cameron and his grizzled predecessor-but-one, Tony Blair. Last year, he trained his lens on Egypt’s then President Mohamed Morsi and on President Obama. “My research rather than the written word or what a person might have had written about them is in looking at a person,” says Kander. “When I look at a person, I intuitively decide how I would like to see them, with regard to how to light them.”

Last month, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a finding that could be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 21st Century. BICEP 2, their microwave telescope in the South Pole, <a href="http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2014-05">detected a distortion</a> that appears to be gravitational waves—ripples in space that are thought to be the first direct confirmation that our universe quickly “inflated” after the Big Bang. The findings, if confirmed, could answer some of science’s most fundamental questions about how the universe was formed.
                        
                        The announcement hit every major media organization within hours. But nearly all of the news coverage included the same caveat: The BICEP 2 findings have not yet been peer-reviewed.
                        
                        Peer review at scholarly journals involves recruiting experts to evaluate a paper before it is approved for publication. When a paper is submitted, the editors send it to two or three reviewers who are considered knowledgeable about the topic. The reviewers and the authors, in theory, do not know each others’ identities. If the reviewers raise objections to the methods or conclusions, the authors must revise the paper before it will be accepted for publication. If the objections are significant, the paper is rejected.
                        
                        Most observers regard non-peer-reviewed results as, at best, preliminary. Instinctively, this makes sense. When a paper is printed in a scientific journal, it acquires the “imprimatur of scientific authenticity” (to quote the physicist John Ziman) and many observers consider its findings to be established scientific facts. It seems like a good idea to subject a paper to expert scrutiny before granting it that sort of status.
                        
                        But it turns out that peer review is only the scientific community’s most recent method of providing this scrutiny—and it’s worth asking if science is, in fact, <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/135756-cerns-higgs-boson-discovery-passes-peer-review-becomes-actual-science">“real” only if it’s been approved by anonymous referees</a>.
                        
                        A few years ago I began writing a book about the history of <em>Nature, </em>one of the world’s most prestigious scientific publications. I was incredibly surprised to learn that <em>Nature </em>published some papers without peer review up until 1973. In fact, many of the most influential texts in the history of science were never put through the peer review process, including Isaac Newton’s 1687 <em>Principia Mathematica</em>, Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity, and James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 <em>Nature </em>paper on the structure of DNA.
                        
                        Most existing historical accounts claim that peer review began at the <em>Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, </em>founded in 1665. And indeed, Henry Oldenburg, the Royal Society secretary who managed the <em>Transactions, </em>did sometimes solicit opinions on papers that he was considering for publication. It would be far too simplistic to say that peer review emerged fully formed from the 17th century, however. Oldenburg consulting his friends about the occasional <em>Transactions </em>paper is a far cry from our current system, which generally involves anonymity and reports from multiple referees.
                        
                        The first formalized refereeing procedures emerged at scientific societies in the 18th century. In 1731, the Royal Society of Edinburgh began to distribute submissions “according to the subject matter to those members who are most versed in these matters.” By the 19th century, the Royal Society of London consulted referees on nearly all papers submitted to the <em>Transactions. </em>These referees prepared reports on the papers, but authors generally would not see them—the reports were meant to help the editors decide which submissions to print, not to suggest revisions.
                        
                        Many widely read specialist journals in the 18th and 19th centuries, however, had no systematic refereeing procedures at all. Commercial scientific journals (such as the <em>Philosophical Magazine</em> and <em>Nature</em>) were often run by dynamic editors who felt qualified to evaluate any contribution. Systematic refereeing was even less common outside the English-speaking scientific world. Academic journals in France and Germany, for example, generally trusted the prominent scientists on their editorial boards to make decisions about which papers to print.
                        
                        Crucially, journals without refereeing processes were not seen as inferior or less “scientific” than those that used referees. Few scientists thought that two anonymous readers would better judge a paper than, say, the great physicist Max Planck (who was on the editorial board of the prominent German journal <em>Annalen der Physik</em>). Scientists unaccustomed to refereeing did not see it as an obviously superior system. In 1936, Albert Einstein—who was used to people like Planck making decisions about his papers without outside opinions—was incensed when the American journal <em>Physical Review </em>sent his submission to another physicist for evaluation. In a terse note to the editor, Einstein wrote:
                        
                        “I see no reason to address the—in any case erroneous—comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.”
                        
                        It was not until the late 20th century that external refereeing came to be seen as an essential feature of a respectable scientific journal. While historians are still trying to work out the reasons for this change, the new emphasis on peer review (a term that itself originated after the Second World War) seems to have been partly a response to the increased public scrutiny that came with massive Cold War financial investments in science. Scientists used peer review to explain why the public—and their fellow scientists—should trust their work and feel confident giving money to scientific research.
                        
                        The explosion in the number of papers being submitted to postwar journals may have provided a secondary motivation. <em>Physical Review</em>, for example, went from publishing 2,310 pages in 1940 to publishing 24,544 pages in 1969. Placing more emphasis on referees may have been a way to lessen the burden on editors.
                        
                        Peer review’s history is of particular interest now because there is an increasing sense in the scientific community that all is not well with the peer review process. In recent years, high-profile papers have passed peer review only to be heavily criticized after publication (such as the <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163">2011 “arsenic DNA” paper in <em>Science</em></a> that claimed a particular bacterium could incorporate arsenic into its DNA—a finding most biologists <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/arsenic-life-bacterium-prefers-phosphorus-after-all-1.11520">have since rejected</a>). Others have been retracted amid allegations of fraud (consider <a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452">the now-infamous 1998 <em>Lancet</em> paper claiming a link between vaccines and autism</a>). Many scientists worry that requiring approval from colleagues makes it less likely that new or controversial ideas will be published. <em>Nature</em>’s former editor John Maddox was fond of saying that the groundbreaking 1953 DNA paper would never have made it past modern peer review because it was too speculative. In 2011, Great Britain’s House of Commons <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmsctech/856/85602.htm">commissioned a report on the state of peer review</a>. The report concluded that while peer review “is crucial to the reputation and reliability of scientific research,” many scientists believe the system stifles innovation and that “there is little solid evidence on its efficacy.”
                        
                        If peer review is indeed broken, <a href="http://peerreviewwatch.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/highlights-from-our-liveblog-of-prwdebate/">as some observers have claimed</a>, an important part of fixing it may be adjusting our expectations of it. It seems a bit ambitious to ask any bureaucratic process to distinguish scientific successes from scientific mistakes with total accuracy. Scientific findings will always be questioned after publication and some will ultimately be rejected, including ones by excellent scientists. Although there are good reasons to solicit expert feedback on scientific articles before publication, the conversation about whether something is “real science” does not end when an article reaches print.
                        
                        Hopefully, this is what will happen with the BICEP 2 gravitational waves: the findings will be written up for publication, referees will offer suggestions and criticisms, and the final paper will have survived some lines of hard inquisition. But we should expect—and hope—that debate about whether the findings are reliable and what they mean for our understanding of the universe will continue long after the referees submit their reports.
                        
                        <i>This piece originally appeared at </i><a href="http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/"><i>Zocalo Public Square</i></a><i>.</i> (Felicity McCabe)
Last month, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a finding that could be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 21st Century. BICEP 2, their microwave telescope in the South Pole, detected a distortion that appears to be gravitational waves—ripples in space that are thought to be the first direct confirmation that our universe quickly “inflated” after the Big Bang. The findings, if confirmed, could answer some of science’s most fundamental questions about how the universe was formed. The announcement hit every major media organization within hours. But nearly all of the news coverage included the same caveat: The BICEP 2 findings have not yet been peer-reviewed. Peer review at scholarly journals involves recruiting experts to evaluate a paper before it is approved for publication. When a paper is submitted, the editors send it to two or three reviewers who are considered knowledgeable about the topic. The reviewers and the authors, in theory, do not know each others’ identities. If the reviewers raise objections to the methods or conclusions, the authors must revise the paper before it will be accepted for publication. If the objections are significant, the paper is rejected. Most observers regard non-peer-reviewed results as, at best, preliminary. Instinctively, this makes sense. When a paper is printed in a scientific journal, it acquires the “imprimatur of scientific authenticity” (to quote the physicist John Ziman) and many observers consider its findings to be established scientific facts. It seems like a good idea to subject a paper to expert scrutiny before granting it that sort of status. But it turns out that peer review is only the scientific community’s most recent method of providing this scrutiny—and it’s worth asking if science is, in fact, “real” only if it’s been approved by anonymous referees. A few years ago I began writing a book about the history of Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific publications. I was incredibly surprised to learn that Nature published some papers without peer review up until 1973. In fact, many of the most influential texts in the history of science were never put through the peer review process, including Isaac Newton’s 1687 Principia Mathematica, Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity, and James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 Nature paper on the structure of DNA. Most existing historical accounts claim that peer review began at the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, founded in 1665. And indeed, Henry Oldenburg, the Royal Society secretary who managed the Transactions, did sometimes solicit opinions on papers that he was considering for publication. It would be far too simplistic to say that peer review emerged fully formed from the 17th century, however. Oldenburg consulting his friends about the occasional Transactions paper is a far cry from our current system, which generally involves anonymity and reports from multiple referees. The first formalized refereeing procedures emerged at scientific societies in the 18th century. In 1731, the Royal Society of Edinburgh began to distribute submissions “according to the subject matter to those members who are most versed in these matters.” By the 19th century, the Royal Society of London consulted referees on nearly all papers submitted to the Transactions. These referees prepared reports on the papers, but authors generally would not see them—the reports were meant to help the editors decide which submissions to print, not to suggest revisions. Many widely read specialist journals in the 18th and 19th centuries, however, had no systematic refereeing procedures at all. Commercial scientific journals (such as the Philosophical Magazine and Nature) were often run by dynamic editors who felt qualified to evaluate any contribution. Systematic refereeing was even less common outside the English-speaking scientific world. Academic journals in France and Germany, for example, generally trusted the prominent scientists on their editorial boards to make decisions about which papers to print. Crucially, journals without refereeing processes were not seen as inferior or less “scientific” than those that used referees. Few scientists thought that two anonymous readers would better judge a paper than, say, the great physicist Max Planck (who was on the editorial board of the prominent German journal Annalen der Physik). Scientists unaccustomed to refereeing did not see it as an obviously superior system. In 1936, Albert Einstein—who was used to people like Planck making decisions about his papers without outside opinions—was incensed when the American journal Physical Review sent his submission to another physicist for evaluation. In a terse note to the editor, Einstein wrote: “I see no reason to address the—in any case erroneous—comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.” It was not until the late 20th century that external refereeing came to be seen as an essential feature of a respectable scientific journal. While historians are still trying to work out the reasons for this change, the new emphasis on peer review (a term that itself originated after the Second World War) seems to have been partly a response to the increased public scrutiny that came with massive Cold War financial investments in science. Scientists used peer review to explain why the public—and their fellow scientists—should trust their work and feel confident giving money to scientific research. The explosion in the number of papers being submitted to postwar journals may have provided a secondary motivation. Physical Review, for example, went from publishing 2,310 pages in 1940 to publishing 24,544 pages in 1969. Placing more emphasis on referees may have been a way to lessen the burden on editors. Peer review’s history is of particular interest now because there is an increasing sense in the scientific community that all is not well with the peer review process. In recent years, high-profile papers have passed peer review only to be heavily criticized after publication (such as the 2011 “arsenic DNA” paper in Science that claimed a particular bacterium could incorporate arsenic into its DNA—a finding most biologists have since rejected). Others have been retracted amid allegations of fraud (consider the now-infamous 1998 Lancet paper claiming a link between vaccines and autism). Many scientists worry that requiring approval from colleagues makes it less likely that new or controversial ideas will be published. Nature’s former editor John Maddox was fond of saying that the groundbreaking 1953 DNA paper would never have made it past modern peer review because it was too speculative. In 2011, Great Britain’s House of Commons commissioned a report on the state of peer review. The report concluded that while peer review “is crucial to the reputation and reliability of scientific research,” many scientists believe the system stifles innovation and that “there is little solid evidence on its efficacy.” If peer review is indeed broken, as some observers have claimed, an important part of fixing it may be adjusting our expectations of it. It seems a bit ambitious to ask any bureaucratic process to distinguish scientific successes from scientific mistakes with total accuracy. Scientific findings will always be questioned after publication and some will ultimately be rejected, including ones by excellent scientists. Although there are good reasons to solicit expert feedback on scientific articles before publication, the conversation about whether something is “real science” does not end when an article reaches print. Hopefully, this is what will happen with the BICEP 2 gravitational waves: the findings will be written up for publication, referees will offer suggestions and criticisms, and the final paper will have survived some lines of hard inquisition. But we should expect—and hope—that debate about whether the findings are reliable and what they mean for our understanding of the universe will continue long after the referees submit their reports. This piece originally appeared at Zocalo Public Square.
Felicity McCabe

That approach often surprises, revealing familiar faces in unfamiliar ways, but none of Kander’s portraits have turned out quite so astonishing as his latest work for TIME, a cover study and portraits of Prince Charles. This is Britain’s heir apparent as he has never before been seen, composed, regal, but more than a little vulnerable. “I was very, very pleased with the outcome,” says Kander. “I was pleased he was so generous with his emotions.”

Kander took the pictures at Birkhall, the Prince’s private residence on the Balmoral estate in Scotland. He spent three hours formulating a plan and choosing locations, settling on a gazebo built by the Prince in memory of his grandmother, the Queen Mother, and on an outdoor shot, on the lawn in earshot of the River Muick – a tributary of the Dee. The photographer prefers not to talk as he shoots, except to give direction, but as Kander’s two assistants readied each of three set-ups, he and the Prince discussed their mutual interest in Jung and Jung’s friend and biographer—and the Prince’s mentor—Laurens van der Post. “[The Prince] and I really gelled,” says Kander.

He didn’t need to use the full 45 minutes allocated for the session: “We very quickly got to some very good pictures.” The images show the Prince not as a figurehead, but in all his complexity, as the sum of his experiences and aspirations. “I am not what happened to me,” wrote Jung. “I am what I choose to become.” Kander saw—and has captured—a man born to wear a crown but striving for a different kind of greatness.

Click here to join TIME for as little as $2.99 to read Catherine Mayer’s full cover story on Prince Charles.


Nadav Kander is a London-based photographer. Kander photographed President Barack Obama for TIME’s Person of the Year Issue in 2012.

Catherine Mayer is an editor-at-large at TIME, based in London. Follow her on Twitter @catherine_mayer.


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