Publications: Nature’s Way

Its drab orange, black and white cover is largely filled with advertisements for obscure scientific apparatus. Its stodgy layout is interrupted by grey numerical tables, grainy photographs and the jagged lines of esoteric graphs. Its language is a polysyllabic jargon that is often incomprehensible to all but a few specialists. Yet despite such shortcomings, London’s weekly Nature magazine has reigned for almost a century as the world’s foremost scientific journal.

In an age of scientific revolution, the magazine might be expected to attempt some innovations. But last week, as he prepared to take over the chair left vacant by the death of Botanist Jack Brimble, New Editor John Maddox, 40, hastened to assure his readers that he had no urge to tamper with success. “The journal is the property of the scientific community as a whole,” he said. “I don’t intend to try to make changes.”

Pages of Letters. Nature’s solid reputation among scientists is built largely around what is perhaps its least readable feature: a letters-to-the-editor section that has come to serve as a major forum of original scientific thought. Each week about 45 pages are filled with highly technical letters from scientists anxious to propound new theories or deflate old ones, to report on laboratory discoveries or the progress of significant investigations. Reports on some of the most important scientific achievements on record were first published in the pages of Nature.

In 1896, for example, the discovery of X rays was described in English for the first time in a paper by Wilhelm Roentgen. Other firsts: isotopes in 1913, synthesis of penicillin in 1942, and the general nature of the genetic code in 1961. In 1908, British Engineer A. A. Campbell Swinton proposed the entire concept of television as it exists today in a short, precise Nature letter. In 1963 an article from Astronomer Maarten Schmidt contained the first published report of the large red shift of light from a quasar, indicating that the mysterious radio sources may be the farthermost objects in the universe.

Most of the 5,000 letters and manuscripts submitted annually are unsolicited, but the editor occasionally “invites” contributions from eminent scientists-who respond to invitations as to a royal command. For their efforts, they receive only token payment—on the theory that publication in Nature is reward enough.

Jungles of Prose. Because scientists from New Delhi to New York respond so readily to Nature’s call, the journal needs no reporters and has only a tiny staff. Along with his assistants, Maddox, a former University of Manchester physics lecturer and science correspondent for Manchester’s Guardian, must nightly hack his way through vast jungles of scientific prose. He selects for publication about two-thirds of the weekly letters, which sometimes have numbered 150 from as many as 50 different countries.

Founded in 1869 by Publisher Alexander Macmillan at the persuasion of famed Astrophysicist Norman Lockyer (the discoverer of helium in the sun), who became the magazine’s first editor, Nature is still published by the Macmillan family, now headed by former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. But the magazine has never let its scientific or journalistic judgment be colored by its owners. Some of the journal’s most scathing reviews—all written by outside experts—have panned scientific books published by Macmillan & Co. Ltd.