Science: The Journal of the AAAS
by Chris Cumo
SCIENCE, THE JOURNAL of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, is arguably the most influential periodical of
its kind. Its 160,000 subscribers make it the largest peer-reviewed
scientific journal. The AAAS publishes Science weekly, giving
it a currency few journals in any discipline can match. Article
topics range from recombinant DNA to photosynthesis. Between
1995 and 2000 43 percent of articles focused on biology, 22
percent on geology, 18 percent on chemistry, 13 percent on
physics and 4 percent on astronomy. The dominance of biology
is no surprise. “This is the golden age of life Science,”
said Bill Buffington, general manager of Agilent Technologies,
in the 1 September 2000 issue of Science. The rediscovery
of Gregor Mendel’s laws of heredity in 1900 has ignited the
Sciences of genetics and molecular biology, which yielded
the hybrid corn revolution of the 1920s, the discovery of
DNA’s structure and function in 1952, the discovery of antibiotics
and the development of vaccines throughout the century, the
rise of gene splicing in the 1970s, and the completion of
a rough map of the human genome in 2000. Biology is now the
queen of the Sciences, a title 19th-century British physicist
William Thompson once reserved for physics.
These disciplines, and Science, share reductionism in common.
The article “Genomics: Building a Case for Sequencing the
Chimp,” in the 25 August 2000 issue of Science implies that
chimpanzees and humans are merely an aggregate of genes. Everything
about us from the color of our eyes to the ideas in our brains
is encoded in our DNA. Ideas are nothing more than electrical
patterns in the brain argues Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers
of DNA’s structure. He is correlating each pattern with an
emotion or ideas. The brain is no tabular Rosa, as John Lock
asserted; it is a labyrinth of electrochemical circuits. At
the most basic level, the human is nothing more than a composite
of atoms. The wisdom of Democritus lives in the physics of
Frank Tipler. The Tulane University mathematician and physicist
believes we are the sum of the quantum mechanical states of
our atoms. Evolution too mouths the credo of reductionism.
The pages of Science chronicle life’s 3.8 billion year
trek from bacterium to human. As recently as 5 million years
ago humans and chimps shared a common ancestor. We are the
Johnny Come Lately on the stage of life, upright apes with
scant hair and big brains. Stephen Jay Gould calls us the
neotenic ape. That is, we retain the rapid brain growth and
sparse hair of our infancy.
Make no mistake: Science is not for the casual reader. Articles
are festooned with citations and the parlance of polypeptides,
quantum fluctuations and paleobotany. More than language thwarts
the casual reader; the intellectual bricks and mortar of science
have a counterintuitive dynamic that separates it from all
other activities, making scientists a priesthood presiding
over the mysteries of the cosmos and Science holy writ. We
perceive a table as a solid object, British physicist Arthur
Eddington emphasized, yet atomic theory undercuts this observation.
A table is composed of atoms, which contain a dense nucleus
that occupies only a minute fraction of an atom. The rest
is space. The table that we suppose to be solid is more than
99 percent space. We cannot even touch a table, notwithstanding
the tactile sensation to the contrary. The electron cloud
at the table’s surface repels the electron cloud at the surface
of my hand, yielding the sensation that I have touched the
table. In fact the electron clouds never meet, for the strength
of repulsion is too great to permit one electron to collide
with another.
Science is the gatekeeper to this counterintuitive priesthood. The
number and breadth of its job postings would amaze anyone
in the liberal arts. Ninety-one of 270 pages in the 4 August
2000 issue of Science were job ads. In contrast, 52 pages
had research articles. Of the jobs in the 8 September issue,
62 percent were tenure-track and the other 38 percent non-tenure-track
and postdoctoral positions. Biology and related disciplines
like entomology and ecology accounted for 84 percent of these
jobs, more than three-quarters of which were in molecular
biology, genetics and medical specialties like anatomy and
oncology. Universities were not alone in courting life scientists.
In the 11 August 2000 issue alone, Pfizer, Genaissance Pharmaceuticals,
Lilly, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Abbott Laboratories
had full-page ads for scientists in research and management.
Universities and businesses in the United States, Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Sweden, Italy, and France advertised for scientists.
Other issues have included ads from the Max Planck Institute
in Berlin and the Swiss Polytechnical Institute, where Einstein
earned his Ph.D.
In addition to serving as a clearing house of jobs, Science
publishes articles that advise job hunters. These balance
recommendations from large companies like Monsanto and start-ups
like Orchid BioSciences Inc., which had only 60 employees
in 1999. Advice is timely and upbeat. Peter Gwynne writes
in the 11 August 2000 issue that life scientists with a B.S.
or M.S. should forgo the Ph.D. in order to cash in immediately
on the flow of capital into biotechnology and agri-chemical
firms. Graduates with majors in biology and computer Science
are particularly hot commodities, he writes. “People graduating
now with a degree in the life Sciences are lucky,” said Sarajane
Mackenzie of Orchid BioSciences in an interview with Gwynne.
“They have their pick of any job.” This optimism is only part
of the journal’s appeal. It combines research articles, news,
job listings and career advise with the skill of a virtuoso.
Each issue addresses a myriad if disciplines in prose that
is clear, precise and authoritative. Articles and news are
as concise as even the busiest researcher could want, and
their comprehensiveness and relevance make Science
the journal of choice for professionals in academe, business
and government. The layman might feel more at home with Scientific
American, but the scientist can do no better than Science.
