An E-Journal for a Vanishing Resource

How can we learn from the exciting times of post-World War II, when American experimental biology was revolutionized and propelled to the forefront of world science, and now, of biotechnology? Part of the answer could be in establishing an electronic journal of the type proposed by former National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus, one that is not edited or refereed. The unique feature of this journal would be that it is particularly aimed at having retired scientists as authors. Before I suggest some specifics regarding such an electronic journal, consider those post-WW II days. Researchers in the biological sciences now had easy access to such wartime products as radioisotopes and antibiotics. The science faculties of American universities and research institutes were revitalized by the influx of our returning scientists and by scientists who had escaped from Nazi Germany. Our graduate schools flourished with the backlog of students now able to attend universities through the G.I. Bill of Rights. The launching of Sputnik by the Russians a decade later catalyzed a bonanza of research funding by the U.S. government that helped propel scientific research to new heights. Now, most of the great post-WW II scientists--such as some of my heroes, Fritz Lipmann, Carl and Gerty Cori, Severo Ochoa, and Melvin Calvin--are gone. Their laboratories spawned young scientists who became leaders in the birth of modern biochemistry, molecular biology, neurobiology, and developmental biology. Many of them are gone also, including my teachers Nathan Kaplan, Sidney Colowick, and William McElroy of the then-newly established Johns Hopkins McCollum-Pratt Institute, my physicists-turned-biophysicists mentors at the Carnegie Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, and my first postdoctoral mentor, W.F. Loomis, working at his family's Loomis Laboratory in the backyard of his suburban Greenwich, Ct., home. Most of my retired scientific peers, also quite alert in their 70s, likely can conjure up memories of their own experiences with other great leaders of that era. Unfortunately, however, only a small though significant fraction of the history of that "Golden Age" of post-WW II experimental biology has been captured. The electronic journal proposed here would serve as a vehicle to bring together and preserve a richer legacy of remembrances of that special time. Those moments and recollections can be relayed best by those of us who were immersed in the science and who worked with the key figures of the period. The availability of this material in an electronic journal would serve as a well of information for professional historians of science to evaluate, consolidate, and interpret. What personal histories of the science of those times that we do have lie hidden in a small number of books and memoirs written by some of the "Golden Age" pioneers, such as A Skeptical Biochemist and the more recent Proteins, Enzymes and Genes by Joseph Fruton; Wanderings of a Biochemist, by Fritz Lipmann; and For the Love of Enzymes: The Odyssey of a Biochemist, by Arthur Kornberg. But these are too few, as are the limited number of entries in the excellent National Library of Medicine's new "Profiles" series (profiles.nlm.nih.gov). Useful autobiographical material by some of the giants of the past can be found in the prefatory chapters in the Annual Reviews series (www.annualreviews.org); also helpful is the growing number of biographies preserved by such scientific organizations as the National Academy of Sciences. That framework needs to be fleshed out to include the recollections and insights of many of the colleagues and graduate and postdoctoral students of the 20th-century research giants. Those recollections can come from emeriti/ae professors who should be the major contributors to the electronic journal I am suggesting. Many emeriti/ae who were trained in the post-WW II years, especially the early ones, can offer something special both to the intellectual history of modern experimental science and to the current advancement of the sciences. Consider the following suggestion for three sections to this electronic journal. Recollections One section would be reserved for recollections of a variety of stories about our mentors and mentors' mentors. These could be about their personal approaches to research and teaching. They could be about key laboratory meetings in which the mentor, postdoctoral students, graduate students, and technicians analyzed experiments, debated approaches, or considered the work of other laboratories. They could be about seminal experiments, techniques, lectures, or organizational events that changed the course of research in those fields. Specifically, in my own first field of research, for example, I would like to see contributions about the network of Enzyme Clubs on the East Coast that brought together some of the great minds of the time period; the origins and activities of the McCollum-Pratt Institute at the Johns Hopkins University and the Enzyme Institute at the University of Wisconsin, two of the dominant powers at that time; and the influence of the McCollum-Pratt Symposia, which were the premier symposia of those years for announcing the biochemical discoveries that were at the forefront. One of the last of these helped inaugurate modern molecular biology with the descriptions by the "grind and find" enzymologists Arthur Kornberg and Severo Ochoa of how they discovered DNA and RNA polymerase. There were great lectures in graduate school that I recall (I still possess my notes from some of them), and one in particular by Nathan Kaplan on how Fritz Lipmann determined the structure of Coenzyme A, primarily by using specific enzymes as reagents--a great story and lesson. From my own postdoctoral peregrinations, I recall a small part of the story of how postwar physicists, such as Philip Abelson and Richard Roberts at the Carnegie Institution of Terrestrial Magnetism and their colleague Martin Kamen, used their knowledge of radioisotopes to map out metabolic pathways. Research Journals A second section of the electronic journal would be reserved for those of us retirees who are moving out of our university offices into smaller homes, and who need to decide where to relocate (I dislike saying "dispose of") our volumes of research journals. Some of them contain intriguing unpublished experiments and observations. Among those experiments may be full works that we never had the time to publish because of other pressures. Generally, most of these incomplete or never-published works would not be acceptable to the hard copy expensive journals of today, which are focusing more on current trends. Yet science will lose many useful observations, experiments, and interpretations if they are not preserved somewhere. An electronic journal could be a repository for these materials, some of which could prove valuable to current scientists and save many a wheel from being rediscovered. Current Work Lastly, although many of us have retired from academic life, it does not mean that we are brain dead. Some of us are still involved in research and/or are still writing papers, whether they be research papers, articles for encyclopedias, or reviews. In addition, from our years of experience, we also may have unique insights that might serve current and future scientists well. In my own case, over the past 46 years I have conducted research and published in such fields as electron transfer; enzymology; metabolism; invertebrate behavior (peptide receptors, protein chemistry, endosymbiosis, and toxins); immobilized enzymes; history of 18th-century biology; and now music cognition. As I changed fields, I made mistakes, but in so doing I learned much. Likewise, I feel that many of my peers also have gained interesting insights through their trials and experiences, insights that might be illuminating to younger scientists just starting their careers. There could be several such electronic journals for emeriti/ae, one for the experimental biologists and others for the physical sciences. The question is, who should start and be responsible for the electronic journal proposed here? I recommend that the sponsors be the same agencies that sponsored the research and careers of today's emeriti/ae scientists. A good place to begin for the experimental biological sciences is with the National Library of Medicine, in recognition of the stimulus of the recent NIH director Harold Varmus, a pioneer advocate of the merits of electronic journals. Such a journal would be a fitting tribute. Howard M. Lenhoff (hmlenhof@uci.edu) is a professor emeritus and research professor in the department of developmental and cell biology, University of California, Irvine.

An E-Journal for a Vanishing Resource

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