The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists Martin J. Evans (University & Medical Center, Cardiff, Wales, UK), Mario Capecchi (University of Utah) , and Oliver Smithies (Chapel Hill), who each independently advanced the use of gene targeting in mice as a means to develop a reliable supply of laboratory animals that were tailored to have some of the same diseases as did humans. Their prizewinning technique involved taking embryonic mouse stem cell cells whose genes had been deliberately altered in a way that replicates a putative human chromosomal error leading to a human disease, and then injecting those cells into a parental generation of mice. Those mice would subsequently have offspring who would naturally replicate those defective genes, enabling easier study of an animal model of the disease, and therefore one on which trials of drugs and other treatments could be more ethically conducted than on humans.
I often wonder if biomedical librarians who actually have Nobel Prizewinners such as these as library customers get sworn to secrecy about what journals they use. I’m not talking about going to jail for taking a principled stand refusing to tell the FBI what books this year’s Laureates, take out (if any), just what e-subscriptions they log onto, or at least insist on the library’s never cutting during a cancelectomy. I am sure that ALA would considerate telling anyone a breach of ethics, and personally, I wouldn’t do it outside of a serials budget meeting of institutional colleagues that has to decide what can be added or cut. Then of course, I would play that subtle Nobel-Prizewinner trump card shamelessly and as often as necessary. I wonder: Just what kind of collection would it take to be Nobel nourishing, as it were?
Since 60 Minutes has not yet cornered any of the lucky Nobel- laureate-serving biomedical librarians to wrench this vital information out of them on national television, we are perhaps best left examining where these laureates publish.
You might assume that since this year’s prizewinners were all being cited by the Nobel Committee specifically for their work with gene-targeting, their journal assortment ought to be very similar. But you might be wrong. There are indeed some journals all of them share as outlets for their work, but it is still interesting to see how they differ in the proportions. Further, since it has been reported that they have never worked together, this makes me wonder what journals they do not share. And there is also the intriguing situation of one laureate who came to America as a child, and was wholly educated , trained and continues to work here (Capecchi), one laureate who was born, educated, trained and continues to work in the UK (Evans), and one who was born, educated, and trained and even did his early professional work in the UK, but has long since migrated to the US (Smithies).
Starting at the Top: Elite Multiscience & General Medical Research Journals
Two of the three laureates have quite a track record of publishing in the great multiscience journals. Both Capecchi and Smithies have appeared in Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They are within a few papers of each other in Nature and Science but Smithies has about seven times as many papers in the Proceedings, and favors that journal almost three times as often the next title on his list. Evans seems to have avoided the limelight in this regard, but he is the only one of them who has even a single paper (and his is actually a letter in the Lancet ) in any one of the traditional Big Three journals of general medical research, with none having any papers in either the New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA.
The Cell Family versus the Nature Family
The war between the super-elite disciplinary journals sponsored by Elsevier subsidiary Cell press vs. Nature press sees participation by both Capecchi and Smithies, but not by Evans. Capecchi and Smithies both appear in Nature Medicine, Nature Genetics, and Nature Reviews Genetics. Both have also appeared in Cell, although Cappechi three times more often. Both have a few appearances in Developmental Cell, but only Capecchi has any papers in Cancer Cell or Neuron.
Journals of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
As noted above, there is an interesting heritage vs. immigration, US vs. UK situation in how these journals play out for our Nobel laureates for their papers in two fields closely related to their work: biochemistry and molecular biology. While this is scarcely an ironclad rule given the frequent trans-Atlantic submission of manuscripts, the best papers originating in the US in this topical area that do not go into Science, PNAS, or one of the Cell or Nature family journals go into the Journal of Biological Chemistry (from the American Society for Biological Chemistry & Molecular Biology) and either Molecular Biology of the Cell (from the American Society for Cell Biology) or Molecular & Cellular Biology (from the American Society for Microbiology). In the UK, these roles are assumed respectively, by Biochemical Journal and the Journal of Molecular Biology (an Elsevier title with a strong tradition of British editorial leadership). Now, recall that both Smithies and Evans are British by birth, education, and early career, but only Evans remained in the UK. Consequently, it is not surprising that both of these two have some papers in Biochemical Journal, but it appears that Smithies decisively switched over to the Journal of Biological Chemistry, while all but one of Evans more biochemical/molecular biology papers were, and will presumably continue to be in British Biochemical Society publications: Biochemical Journal and Biochemical Society Transactions, a symposium journal. Evans has not published papers in journals of molecular biology, but Smithies and Capecchi have, and their patterns are virtually identical, a few papers in the Journal of Molecular Biology, both early in their careers, but then three times as many papers for both the British-born and the naturalized since childhood American author in Molecular & Cellular Biology. This Capecchi-Smithies “Americanization” for lack of a better word seems reinforced by their shared behavior in appearing at least five times each in the premier symposium journal in molecular biology: the US-based Cold Spring Harbor Symposia in Quantitative Biology.
Journals of Genes & Development
Given that the work for which all three laureates were cited was gene targeting using embryonic stem cells, it would seem likely that all would be heavy publishers in journals of genetics and developmental biology (which covers the expression of genes in embryos, among other topics). While both Capecchi and Smithies have arguably published their most important genetics work in Nature family titles, both have also appeared in the Genetics Society of America journal Genetics, and in Elsevier’s US.-based Trends in Genetics. While Capecchi was one of the first contributors to new US-based Open Access PLoS Genetics, Smithies wrote a particularly notable article in the US-based Annual Review of Genetics and also appears to be more heavily involved in the larger scale sequencing work done in the American Physiological Society’s Physiological Genomics, Elsevier’s US-based Genomics and Springer’s NY office journal, Mammalian Genome. Where Capecchi and Smithies part company most is on the embryonic side, where Capecchi is arguably the world’s leader in basic research: Capecchi has dozens of papers in US-based journals, largely in Developmental Biology (Elsevier for the largely American, Society for Developmental Biology) and Genes & Development (Cold Springs Harbor Press), and a few in Developmental Dynamics (Wiley), as well as in UK-based Development, and one in a journal of which he is an editor, European-based Mechanisms of Development from Elsevier.
What About Evans & the Physiology in the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine?
We have finally come to an area of special strength for Evans, who is by far, the most clinical, physiological, and especially metabolic in his concerns. In this he is joined to some degree by Smithies. Both have appeared in journals of organ-system physiology, sharing an interest in the relationship between hypertension & electrolyte imbalance in kidney function (for Evans Circulation, American Journal of Hypertension, American Journal of Kidney Diseases; for Smithies Hypertension, American Journal of Physiology- Heart & Circulatory, American Journal of Physiology - Renal & Electrolytes, Journal of the American College of Nephrology, and Kidney International). Both Evans & Smithies have papers in journals of general endocrinology and metabolism (for Evans the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, for Smithies Endocrinology , and Molecular Endocrinology, and for both the American Journal of Physiology- Endocrinology & Metabolism.) What most clearly sets Evans apart even from Smithies is an abiding interest in genetically influenced disorders in diabetes (Diabetologia, Springer for the European Society for the Study of Diabetes), and disorders in the synthesis, utilization and accumulation of fats (Current Opinion in Lipidology, Wolters Kluwer, Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins), and a title that wraps it all up (Diabetes, Obesity & Metabolism now from Wiley-Blackwell).
Congratulations
Well, how well have you done at your institution? Thank goodness for me, that the University of Arkansas flagship campus in Fayetteville where I work , electronically shares virtually all these titles with our medical campus in Little Rock, about 200 miles away. I have only worked here about three months, so I honestly cannot yet take any credit (not that I won’t try).
But there are biomedical librarians out there who do deserve mankind’s thank-yous and the biomedical world’s congratulations. They may be faceless and who knows, even actually sworn to secrecy, but I doubt that even these three brilliant scientists could have done what they did, without brilliant biomedical librarians on their side throughout their long and storied careers. I for one, salute you all!
Tony Stankus, [email protected] Life Sciences Librarian & Professor, University of Arkansas Libraries MULN 223E, 365 North McIlroy Avenue, Fayetteville, AR 72701-4002 Voice: 479-575-4031 Fax: 479-575-4592
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