The David Niven factor and a new journal
Kevin Davies, the founding editor of Nature Genetics, recalls the perfect storm of events and personalities that governed the launch of the journal 15 years ago and its formative years. The journal offered a high-profile forum for the genetics community—and a bold new direction for what is now Nature Publishing Group.
The then editor of Nature, John Maddox [now Sir John Maddox], whose presence in the London office was evident by the pall of cigarette smoke billowing from his corner cubicle, frequently enjoyed thumbing through stacks of rejected manuscripts to see what Nature was turning away. In particular, the ALS rejection perplexed him. "We are, after all, in the publishing business," he reminded the biology team, and exhorted us to always consider the broader public interest in our decisions. He even coined a name for it—"the David Niven factor"—after the debonair British actor who had died of the disease. Of course, Nature was never intended to be the forum for publishing mundane mendelian linkage papers, but we smartly heeded the boss's advice, and at least one more was published following his intervention: the mapping of the gene for Werner syndrome. More importantly, however, Maddox had highlighted the quality of many genetics papers that Nature couldn't accommodate—and the tantalizing possibilities, should we seek to publish more of them.
Read more of the story of how Nature Genetics began in the Editorial of the July issue of the journal (Nature Genetics 39, 805-806; 2007).
