Essays from the Editors
Richard Gallagher, current editor of The Scientist, reflects on how far we've come and where we're headed in the years ahead.
Barbara Spector, editor of The Scientist from 1995 to 1998, recalls a period of excitement and transition. Read her essay now. Read her essay now.
Tabitha Powledge, who served as The Scientist's first editor, reflects on the publication's beginnings in Washington, DC, and its reception by the scientific and publishing communities.
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In the beginning By Tabitha Powledge
The Washington Post reporter asked, "Are you people crazy? Why are you starting a science magazine now?" It was a month before The Scientist launched two decades ago. After a brief golden age, science publications had been going under. Science 80n, the classy consumer magazine, had just folded, and it was based in Washington. Just as The Scientist was about to be.
So I explained once more, as I had to dozens of puzzled people in the preceding 18 months, that we weren't starting a science magazine. We were starting a trade newspaper for scientists. I had learned, to my bafflement, that people found it hard to get their minds around that idea, even though trade papers were common in other vocations, from Medical Tribune to Toy & Hobby World.
I had resorted to defining our baby by explaining what it was not. It was not a journal and would not describe experiments and research results. It was not a science magazine for the general public either. It was not a magazine at all. It was a newspaper -- and worse, a tabloid newspaper. It would contain short news stories and colorful feature stories and commentary and interviews.
Those pages would be filled with science policy and trends and funding and animal activists and creationism and laboratory construction and the ethics of co-authorship and scientific computing and professional issues like salaries and the demographics of the scientific workforce (race, women, and the Old Boy Network.) Articles on all these topics appeared in the first few issues of the paper, just as they have in the latest ones in the magazine and on the Web. The form has changed. The content has not.
Today the idea of science as a profession is as commonplace as satellite transmission. Today Nature has a weekly jobs section and Science devotes a separate chunk of its website to career issues. Journals in all disciplines routinely carry news stories on policy and professional matters. I won't quite claim The Scientist invented analyzing and reporting on science as a profession, but I'm certain we had a lot to do with making that approach essential to the life of science and scientists -- and making it an important part of my own profession, science journalism.
But in the beginning, people thought it was weird that The Scientist wasn't about the glamour of discovery and gee-whiz-ain't-science-grand. Instead we were looking at science and scientists as struggling with the same issues that beset other lines of work: social trends, politics, the economy, employment ups and downs, and the desperate daily ordinariness of money, money, money. Once the Washington Post reporter understood that, he lost interest. I suspect our plans struck him as a bit…..boring.
But I think we helped change the world. |