When Norman Lockyer, an astronomer and science writer with a day job as a clerk at the War Office in London, approached the publishing house Macmillan and Company in 1869 with a proposal for a new weekly journal about science, few could have predicted the outcome. The journal in question was Nature, and given its influence over the past 146 years, it is hard to believe that Melinda Baldwin’s Making Nature is the first full-length book to be written about it.

As Baldwin explains, Lockyer had originally intended Nature to appeal to both scientists and the general public, but the former refused to write in a way that could be understood by the latter, and the journal soon focused on researchers. However, Lockyer’s double-stranded philosophy is still in evidence in the modern Nature, where the “front half” contains news, opinion articles, book reviews and other magazine-style content aimed at a wide readership, while the “back half” is home to research papers aimed at specialists. Lockyer also established the idea of the journal being a player in the game, rather than merely reporting what was happening.

In its early decades, Nature was not the place where scientists sent their best work, but by the 1890s it was fast becoming the place where they could find out about and discuss exciting results that had been published elsewhere. The avalanche of new physics kicked off by the discovery of X-rays in November 1895 is a good example. Wilhelm Röntgen submitted his paper (written in German) to the Physical Medical Society of Würzburg on 28 December 1895 and sent copies to other physicists around the world, including Lord Kelvin in Glasgow and Arthur Schuster in Manchester. The discovery was widely reported in British newspapers in early 1896, and there was a short report in the issue of Nature dated 16 January 1896. However, Nature quickly showed what it was capable of, with the next issue containing an English translation of Röntgen’s paper; a paper from the Scottish engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton reporting that he had successfully repeated Röntgen’s experiments; and letters from Schuster and James Thomas Bottomley, a physicist at the University of Glasgow.

Although the paper reporting the discovery of X-rays was published in a German journal, Nature’s speed and engagement with researchers in the UK at the time meant that it was at the heart of the action as modern physics took shape. Relatively little of the original work was published in Nature but, as with X-rays, the journal played an important role in spreading news of the latest developments. All this was to pay dividends in the form of original research papers in later years from James Chadwick, Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi (although Nature did reject Fermi’s seminal paper on the theory of beta decay).

By the 1930s Nature editorials increasingly covered topics outside the UK, notably the suppression of scientists in the Soviet Union and the threats posed by the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. However, the Second World War restricted the number of pages the journal could print, and its front half entered a lull. There were some highlights in this period, such as the publication of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, but as one long-time contributor put it: “almost anything could get into it at the time, if it wasn’t actually wrong”.

The lull ended when John Maddox was appointed editor in the mid-1960s. A former physics lecturer turned science journalist, Maddox immediately set about shaking up Nature’s front half, dealing with a backlog of 2000 submissions awaiting a decision and overhauling the journal’s approach to peer review. In 1971, however, Maddox took the bold decision to split Nature into three: Nature Physical Sciences was published on Monday, Nature New Biology on Wednesday and Nature on Friday. While this move clearly prefigures the more recent explosion in Nature-branded titles, it was not a success financially (the cost of a subscription remained the same as printing and postage costs soared), or editorially (being published in one of the “offcuts” felt like a demotion to authors), and the new titles were folded back into Nature at the end of 1973.

By that time, Maddox had been replaced by the geophysicist David Davies, who began to place greater emphasis on the use of external referees for papers that had survived scrutiny by Nature’s own editors. But in 1980 Davies decided he was ready for a new challenge, and, to many people’s surprise, Maddox returned. Baldwin focuses on two notorious incidents during this second term: the Benveniste affair and cold fusion. In 1988, in one of the more bizarre episodes of modern science, Maddox decided – against the advice of referees and his own staff – to publish a paper on homeopathic dilution by Jacques Benveniste and co-workers. He then led a team of investigators to Benveniste’s lab to watch the experiments being repeated. The team was unimpressed, the results were discredited (but never retracted) and Maddox emerged with his reputation somewhat tarnished. Baldwin argues (convincingly in my view) that his unorthodox behaviour was driven by his belief that Nature should follow Lockyer’s lead and take an active part in science.

His fingers burned by the Benveniste affair, Maddox was more cautious when cold fusion arrived the following year. Briefly, Nature rejected a paper by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, accepted a paper on muon-catalysed cold fusion that made more modest claims, and then proceeded to publish a series of articles that poured cold water on both. Active, yes, but also more orthodox.

Maddox stepped down in 1995, and under his successor Philip Campbell (previously editor of Physics World), both Nature and its parent company have continued to grow and prosper. This poses a challenge to the historian: if you are writing a history of an institution that is still going strong, when should the book end? Baldwin concludes with a disappointing chapter about current trends in publishing: Nature is at the centre of several important debates about scientific publishing, but Making Nature covers them fleetingly, if at all. Open access and the growth of Nature-branded journals are both mentioned, but it is odd not to discuss the degree to which Nature Publishing Group is staking its future on two open-access publications – Scientific Reports and Nature Communications (which now employs more manuscript editors than Nature itself) – while continuing to launch new subscription journals at an ever-increasing rate.

However, the biggest omission, I feel, is a failure to analyse the remarkable influence that Nature and two other journals – Cell and Science – exert on researchers in the life sciences and biomedical research. Many early-career researchers in these fields believe that they need a paper in one of these journals to stand a chance of getting a permanent position. This state of affairs is generally attributed to the high “impact factors” (a measure of how often papers are cited) of these journals, but Baldwin is silent on how Nature went from being ranked 109th by impact factor in 1975 to being “unquestionably top of the journal hierarchy, rivalled only by Science and Cell”. Part of the reason is that it now publishes considerably fewer papers per week than it did in 1975.

Given the focus of earlier chapters on the Benveniste affair and cold fusion, it also seems odd not to mention some of the high-profile scandals that have rocked science since then, and to overlook the “reproducibility crisis” that Nature has covered at length in its front half. The Benveniste affair would have been an ideal starting point for such a debate. There is more to be written about the history of Nature.

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