Preface

Nature is the world's most influential science journal. It has published some of the most important discoveries in modern science, and has carried contributions from leading scientists, ranging from Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein to James Watson, Francis Crick and Stephen Hawking. Since its earliest days it has reported on all areas of science, from the study of human origins to the structure of the universe, from genetics to nuclear physics.

So it is surprising that no substantial overview of Nature 's publication history has been attempted until now. And while Nature is known globally, access to its full archive has been rather less easy outside of Western countries (although the full archive is now available online). That is why this collection, titled Nature: the Living Record of Science , will provide an indispensable resource. It supplies an unparalleled view of how the preoccupations and priorities of science have changed over the last century and more, often in a way that reflects currents in the broader social and political landscape. The collected papers—more than 840 selected from over 100,000 published in the journal over the past century and a half—offer a vision of what society wants from science, and what science has given society.

The evolution of Nature

Nature is almost unique in publishing leading research in every area of science. The journal was begun in 1869 by the enterprising English astronomer J. Norman Lockyer. Its aim, announced (for reasons now forgotten) only in the second issue of 11 November, was:

“First, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery; and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life;

And, secondly, to aid Scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time.”

That is a fair statement of Nature 's goal today. In the first issue, the reader could find Lockyer's description of a recent total solar eclipse in America, Thomas Henry Huxley's analysis of some newly discovered dinosaur fossil bones from the Triassic period, some observations of the absorption and radiation of heat by the German physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus, and an obituary of the Scottish chemist Thomas Graham, the father of colloid chemistry. Such breadth of subject matter has been characteristic of the journal ever since.

The first issue of Nature appeared at a time when periodical publishing was booming and science was increasingly seen as an integral part of daily life. There was a general consensus that scientists deserved greater respect, social distinction and financial support. At the same time, there was a calling for scientific education to be expanded and interest in science to be encouraged. From its inception, Nature has been produced by the British publishers Macmillan & Co., although there is now no record of how that arrangement came about.

Lockyer was an astronomer and civil servant who had been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society six months before Nature first appeared in print. He was well connected in the scientific community, counting the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the physicist John Tyndall among his circle of associates. He called on the services of both men in the early days of Nature , helping to establish its authoritative status. As editor, Lockyer displayed from the outset some of the characteristics that Nature went on to display in later times. He was unashamed to parade his own enthusiasms, making the journal particularly welcoming to research on the physics of the sun. He gave it an international flavour, including reports on meetings in such places as St. Petersburg, Vienna and Philadelphia. He was willing, indeed eager, to include news and gossip from within the scientific community, and happy to court controversy and to report it plainly: some of the arguments that rage in the early pages have an acerbic tone that reveals a hands-off editorial touch. And he was ready to offer robust opinions on public affairs and matters of state that might seem only tangentially relevant to science.

Yet despite Nature 's mission statement to “place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery”, the journal made few concessions to the non-scientist. It was not until well into the following century that Nature underwent its metamorphosis. John Maddox became editor in 1966 and set about making the journal less scholarly and more engaging to readers, while in no way compromising its academic stature. It was Maddox's hope that everyone would be able to read and understand reports of new discoveries in any area of science.

That was an ambitious goal. Even now, the research papers in Nature are not easy reading for the lay person with no scientific education, and with the increasing specialization of science it is often difficult even for scientists to understand papers outside their own field. On the other hand, the expansion of Nature into a publishing group with many “sister” journals, such as Nature Genetics, Nature Geoscience and Nature Materials , as well as the advent of new media for communicating and providing content such as news, has given Nature further tools and avenues for reaching new, broader audiences. It remains the most highly cited interdisciplinary science journal.

Probably the most famous, and arguably the most influential, paper to appear in Nature was that written by Francis Crick and James Watson, published in 1953, describing the structure of DNA, the molecule that carries every organism's genes. It was quickly seen as a major breakthrough in understanding how heredity works: the molecule's structure, in which genetic information is encoded in the sequence of chemical building blocks as a four-letter code, immediately suggested how this information might be copied and passed on from one generation to the next. This was the missing link in Darwin's theory of evolution, showing how genes work at the molecular scale. The understanding that flowed from Crick and Watson's epoch-defining paper paved the way to developments such as the decoding of the entire human genome and the cloning of Dolly the sheep, also both reported first in Nature , in papers included in this collection.

Several other disciplines have been transformed by discoveries that Nature has reported. The theory of plate tectonics, advanced in the 1930s, was verified by the discovery of seafloor spreading by Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews in 1963. The birth of nuclear physics, which profoundly affected not only physical science but society and international relations, was traced in contributions to Nature from the likes of Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Otto Hahn, Irène Joliot-Curie and Otto Frisch in the 1920s and 30s. The quantum-mechanical nature of matter was revealed by the discovery in 1927 by Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer of wave-like properties in beams of electrons. This collection also records the birth of key developments in atmospheric and environmental sciences, from the discovery in 1985 of the destruction of ozone in the stratospheric layer above Antarctica to the gradual recognition of human-made global warming and the interactions between the biosphere, oceans, geological earth and ice sheets in bringing about the climate fluctuations of the past.

Tribute to John Maddox, Co-Editor-in-Chief

Sir John Maddox died, aged 83, while this project was in its final stages. He served as chief editor of Nature from 1966 to 1973, and then again from 1980 to 1995. Under his leadership, Nature was transformed from a rather austere periodical to a publication that combined the strengths of a major scientific journal of record and a magazine that made the latest advances in science understandable to a wider audience. This character reflected that of Maddox himself, who trained as a physicist at King's College London before, in 1955, becoming one of the leading science journalists of his day at the Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian ).

It was his journalistic instinct that enabled Maddox to restore Nature 's position as an influential voice in the scientific community. In the tradition of Lockyer, he was willing to make the journal vigorously outspoken on matters that demanded it, as for example when Nature campaigned against the dangerous and damaging claims made by the Sunday Times newspaper in the early 1990s that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. This forthright attitude earned Maddox something of a reputation as a maverick, and he himself adopted a contrarian stance against some aspects of scientific orthodoxy—he remained sceptical about the Big Bang (which he worried was “too neat”), and for many years expressed doubts about the notion that human activity was causing global warming. (Maddox later changed his mind on this.) Most famously, perhaps, Maddox published a paper from French scientists that appeared to lend scientific support to homeopathy. He argued that “there are good and particular reasons why prudent people should, for the time being, suspend judgment” about the experiments, and soon after he led an equally controversial investigation into the claims.

Nonetheless, Maddox was a tireless opponent of what he viewed as anti-scientific and anti-rational views. A lifelong atheist, his funeral service was conducted in a tent just outside the church grounds in which he was buried.

Maddox was also a strong advocate of international research, and acutely aware of the social impacts of scientific advance—he was a member of the Pugwash Group that campaigns for nuclear non-proliferation. In 1995 he was awarded a knighthood, which he said he accepted for the sake of Nature rather than himself, and in 2000 he was the first person ever to be elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society, an accolade almost unheard of in recent times for anyone whose career has not been primarily in scientific research. A scientific polymath, it was sometimes said that John Maddox was one of the few people capable of reading Nature from cover to cover and understanding more or less all of it. Certainly, it is hard to think of anyone else with the breadth of knowledge needed to oversee this collection.

Selection of papers for Nature: the Living Record of Science

The well-known papers mentioned above were obvious candidates for inclusion, and are among the 840 odd papers which make up this collection. The initial selection was made by John Maddox, who chose over 2,000 of Nature 's most prestigious articles. This expansive list was then condensed and supplemented by Philip Ball, then a consultant editor for Nature and a freelance writer on all areas of science, who became the Managing Editor of the project in October 2007.

It was clearly necessary for all the papers to have been “important” in some sense, but the process to assess the worthiness of each paper was by no means straightforward. For one thing, most of the truly important currents in science are more aptly seen as tidal swells than tsunamis: they arrive by steady accumulation, not in one sudden inundation. It was sometimes necessary to arrive at a compromise between the need to do justice to the important themes in scientific research, as they were reflected in the pages of Nature , and the absence of any single contribution that was transformative to a given theme.

There are several ways in which a paper can be deemed important. Some may have helped to establish a particular field of enquiry—for example, the search for gravity waves in space, or for planets around other stars—even if the actual findings reported in the paper itself have not stood the test of time. Such papers are not necessarily of only historical interest. They might, for example, illuminate what was happening in other areas of science, and shed light on how the ideas of the time were received. This seems true of the many discussions in Nature , for at least 50 years after the publication of Charles Darwin's Descent of Man , of eugenics: efforts to engineer the genetics of human populations by selective breeding. These ideas are now discredited, but it would seem not only dishonest in historical terms to ignore them but also a distortion of how biologists at that time were interpreting Darwinian theory.

One underlying principle of the selection process was to maintain an international perspective on the importance of each paper, rather than a bias towards scientific discoveries related to China, or of discoveries made by Chinese scientists. Within this context, the important findings of Chung-yao Chao, Pei-ji Chen and Zhi-ming Dong are included in the collection purely for their substantial contributions to the global scientific community.

Some papers may look, from today's perspective, to be of limited relevance—often simply because their findings have been so thoroughly assimilated. For example, some of the early studies in the chemistry of vitamins, or attempts to understand the nature of the atomic nucleus and its constituent particles, might not seem like “classics” in their own right, but at the time they were key stepping-stones in the journey towards a deeper understanding of the phenomena in question.

A few papers in the collection are not just “wrong”, but notoriously so. The “polywater” affair of the late 1960s and 1970s, in which Soviet scientists claimed to have discovered a new, ultra-viscous form of water, proved groundless, most probably being an artefact of experimental contamination. But both it and the putative “memory of water” reported in Nature in 1988 not only illustrate how science is done (and how it may be done badly) but also highlight ongoing themes in the investigation of water's molecular structure. The papers included here that investigate the alleged “cold fusion” of hydrogen not only serve to mark this prominent scientific controversy of the late 1980s but also played an important role in showing it to be the result of faulty experimentation. The same is true of the papers that uncover the palaeontological fraud of “Piltdown Man”.

Some reviews of the state of play of a discipline by leading scientists have been included, even though they do not in themselves report new discoveries, in part because such contributions serve as landmarks that, with the imprimatur of Nature , established the work they describe as now a solid part of the body of science and helped to gain its recognition from a wide audience. That is true, for example, of the sole contribution in the collection by Albert Einstein, a 1921 survey of the historical development of his theory of relativity. By this time, general relativity was widely accepted, especially after the demonstration in 1919 by Arthur Eddington that light from distant stars is bent by gravity as the theory predicts. Yet a paper in Nature was still a powerful signal to readers in the English-speaking world that general relativity was here to stay.

Such review-type papers were an important component of what Nature published in the pre-war era. Whereas in recent decades there has been a rather clear demarcation between original research papers, reviews, and commentary on developments reported elsewhere, in earlier times the distinctions were more fluid, and strictly new research was less prevalent in the journal's pages. Without these “overview” papers, much of what was happening in science at that time would have been missed. This is increasingly true the further back one goes, so that in its first several decades Nature seems more a kind of “scientific newspaper”, reporting at least as much gossip, rumour, curiosities and accounts of learned meetings as any novel research. Perhaps this is a reflection of how the reporting of science has become increasingly professionalised and standardised—with both advantages and drawbacks.

In general, however, the selected papers in this collection are primary scientific contributions, not comments on work reported elsewhere, or editorials, book reviews, obituaries and so forth. That is a reflection of the intended aims of this collection, although it means that it provides only a partial view of the “flavour” of the journal itself. Some of the liveliest writing has appeared in these “excluded” genres, and the reader will need to look elsewhere for a more general sense of the journal's full character—most notably, it can be sampled in A Bedside Nature (W. H. Freeman, 1997), edited by Walter Gratzer (who also assisted the current selection process) and providing a miscellany of contributions between 1869 and 1953.

Introductions to the papers

Each of the selected papers is accompanied by a brief introduction that explains the key findings and places them in the context of their times. These introductions, which were written by John Maddox and several members of Nature 's current and former editorial staff, strive to sketch (they can do no more, given space constraints) the broader picture: why the work was important, how it changed or contributed to thinking at the time and how the conclusions have been vindicated, modified or rendered obsolete by later work. Occasionally they provide a glimpse of the paper's author(s), who are often figures extremely eminent in their time (if perhaps less known today)—or people who were later to become so. One of the most rewarding aspects of the process of editing Nature: the Living Record of Science was that it served as a reminder of what an extraordinary range and depth of research has been announced in Nature , and by what a remarkable collection of scientists. Inevitably, the collection can do only partial justice to that—but the introductory pieces go some way to compensating for what could not be included, by filling in some of the gaps and forging links that are not immediately evident from the papers themselves. In some cases, it is only with hindsight that the significance of a particular discovery becomes apparent, and we have occasionally needed to point out implications that were not even clear to a paper's author(s).

Scientific publishing in China

Publishing and the media have played a significant role in spreading and promoting modern science. In late 19 th century China, for example, translations of Western natural and social science works added tremendous momentum to the country's movement from a feudal society into the modern age. One of the most influential translations was that of Thomas Henry Huxley's Evolution and Ethics by the scholar Yan Fu (1854-1921), who studied at the Naval Academy in Greenwich, England, in 1877-1879. It immediately became essential reading for progressive young thinkers, and the ideas of natural selection that it described influenced several generations of intellectuals. Huxley was one of the key figures in the development of Nature , and made many contributions to early issues. Charles Darwin, whose ideas Huxley expounded, was also a reader and correspondent, and one of his contributions features in the first volume of this collection. The implications of his evolutionary theory stimulated many discussions in Nature 's pages, and indeed continue to do so today, as illustrated in the special issue of Nature in 11 February 2009 to celebrate the 200 th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150 th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species .

With the rapid growth of its economy and an increasing output of scientific research in the past three decades, China is now regarded as a major scientific force in the Asia-Pacific region and in the world at large. The number of active scientists and researchers in China is now second only to that of the United States, and the number of research papers they generate overtook those from the United Kingdom and Japan in 2008. These developments make it ever more important that high-quality scientific research papers, both past and present, be readily accessible within China. Most of the scientific literature is not available in the Chinese language; this collection takes the first step to change that situation, with the original articles represented as they first appeared in Nature and the translations strictly reviewed for faithfulness. The articles are arranged in chronological order, and an index of classification is provided for quick reference.

An unprecedented collection

Nature: the Living Record of Science is unprecedented in that it represents the first ever large collection of science articles of any sort written for students and researchers worldwide—regardless of their nationality. The collection covers a wide range of disciplines, from biology to the earth and environmental sciences, materials science and physics. It is translated into the Chinese language and published in bilingual format so as to bridge different cultures in a fashion that can stimulate international research.

We wish to take this opportunity to thank all the translators, reviewers and editors for their painstaking efforts in making the project a success. We also look forward to closer cooperation between the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, the Macmillan Publishing Group and Nature Publishing Group in providing more high-quality science works for scientists and students, and other interested readers in China. Such cooperation, we believe, will effectively promote the exchange of ideas and sharing of achievements between Chinese and Western scientists.

Editor-in-Chief of Nature