The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to William G. Kaelin Jr., Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza on October 7 for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability. Congratulations to them!
A photo of a rejection letter from Nature to Dr. Ratcliffe has been making the rounds on LinkedIn and Twitter, and maybe other internet places that I don’t frequent, for the last few days. Numerous people have independently posted the photo below along with various messages. I’ve found it quite interesting how the letter has been interpreted and presented. So I decided to give my take on it, from a scientific writer and writing instructor’s perspective.
Many of the posters have chosen to treat the letter as inspiration. “Don’t give up”, they say. “Be persistent”, they say. They seem to imply, without coming out and saying it, that if you just keep trying, someday you too will win a Nobel Prize! While I think being positive and encouraging is commendable, this message is just not very realistic. Most of us in the science world are never going to win a Nobel Prize. So I find this message a little bit of a head-scratcher. Some other posters have used this letter to bash Nature, or to bash the peer-review system. I find this interesting also, but I don’t want to get into that.
If you read the letter carefully, it is not a harsh letter at all. It reads very sympathetically to the authors, to my eye. It states that reviewer 2 “is not persuaded that [the findings presented] represent sufficient advance in our understanding of the mechanisms of genetic response to hypoxia to justify publication in Nature”. It also states that reviewer 1 pointed out a discrepancy, which is not specified in greater detail. The editor goes on to suggest to Dr. Ratcliffe that the article “would be better placed in a more specialized journal”.
I have two takeaways from this letter. The first one is that reviewer 2, and apparently the editor also, did not see “a sufficient advance in understanding of the mechanisms”, which is an entirely valid criticism for work going into Nature. I see three possibilities here. The first is that the reviewer was correct, and the authors did not provide evidence for a large advance in explaining the mechanisms for this phenomenon. The second possibility is that the reviewer simply did not understand the importance of the work because the reviewer was not sophisticated enough. The third possibility is that the authors did not explain how the work advanced understanding of these mechanisms well enough. Not having access to the original manuscript, I can’t say which of these is correct. But let’s look at possibilities 2 and 3. Most of the time when a reader or reviewer “is not persuaded” or doesn’t understand what the author is saying, the fault lies with the authors and their explanation (or lack thereof). Sometimes the reviewer just gets it wrong, but more often than not, it’s the author that is at fault.
I don’t know any of the backstory, only this letter and the Nobel Prize press release. But I think it’s safe to assume that Dr. Ratcliffe and his co-authors took the reviewer comments into consideration, made revisions to the paper, and submitted it to another journal. We don’t know how much better the second manuscript was compared to the first one that Nature rejected. Most of the times I have had a paper rejected, I went on to write an even better paper after the rejection. And in the long run I was grateful for that rejection, as I produced better work because of the reviewer comments and the additional effort I had to put into my writing.
The second takeaway I have from this letter, which is something I tell my students, is that you need to select the most appropriate journal for your work, or you run the risk of rejection. It seems to me that, in this particular case, Nature may not have been the most appropriate venue. The editor suggested to Dr. Ratcliffe that they publish in a more specialized Journal. Maybe they should have gone for the more specialized journal the first try, I don’t know. But I do know that Science and Nature publish very few of the manuscripts that they receive, and the ones they do publish they tend to be of interest to a wide audience, rather than being highly specialized.
Another thing that many of the people posting this letter have said is that the work referenced in the rejection letter is the work that went on to win the Nobel Prize. To the right, I have directly copied from the Nobel Prize website the “Key publications” that the Nobel Prize was based on.
Notice the dates and authors of these publications. Dr. Ratcliffe was not an author on the 1991 and 1995 papers. He was an author on the 1999 paper and one of the 2001 papers. Yet, the rejection letter is from 1992.
Based on the timing, I have my doubts that the Nature rejection applies to any of these five papers. But, if the posters are correct when they say that the work in the rejection letter is what won the Nobel Prize, then it took an additional seven years for Ratcliffe and his team to publish the work.
In that case, Nature was right to reject the work, because taking that much more time to publish it shows that it was not ready to be published in 1992.
While you are here, why not take a look at another post or two? Here is one on Open Access publishing.
What do you think about the Nature rejection? Leave a comment below!
- Semenza, G.L, Nejfelt, M.K., Chi, S.M. & Antonarakis, S.E. (1991). Hypoxia-inducible nuclear factors bind to an enhancer element located 3’ to the human erythropoietin gene. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 88, 5680-5684
- Wang, G.L., Jiang, B.-H., Rue, E.A. & Semenza, G.L. (1995). Hypoxia-inducible factor 1 is a basic-helix-loop-helix-PAS heterodimer regulated by cellular O2 tension. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 92, 5510-5514
- Maxwell, P.H., Wiesener, M.S., Chang, G.-W., Clifford, S.C., Vaux, E.C., Cockman, M.E., Wykoff, C.C., Pugh, C.W., Maher, E.R. & Ratcliffe, P.J. (1999). The tumour suppressor protein VHL targets hypoxia-inducible factors for oxygen-dependent proteolysis. Nature, 399, 271-275
- Mircea, I., Kondo, K., Yang, H., Kim, W., Valiando, J., Ohh, M., Salic, A., Asara, J.M., Lane, W.S. & Kaelin Jr., W.G. (2001) HIFa targeted for VHL-mediated destruction by proline hydroxylation: Implications for O2 sensing. Science, 292, 464-468
- Jaakkola, P., Mole, D.R., Tian, Y.-M., Wilson, M.I., Gielbert, J., Gaskell, S.J., von Kriegsheim, A., Heberstreit, H.F., Mukherji, M., Schofield, C.J., Maxwell, P.H., Pugh, C.W. & Ratcliffe, P.J. (2001). Targeting of HIF-α to the von Hippel-Lindau ubiquitylation complex by O2-regulated prolyl hydroxylation. Science, 292, 468-472
0 Comments