Best of Nature --please add your choices
Maxine Clarke
Monday, 17 March 2008 08:50 UTC
The website for the history of Nature has a section called Best of Nature, in which readers are asked to nominate and “vote” for their favourite classic Nature papers. You can add them using the doi so it is quite quick. Members of this forum might like to add the papers they nominate here to Best of Nature (if they were published in Nature, that is!) and/or visit the Best of Nature site to add their comments and votes to the papers so far selected by readers — and of course, add any papers they find on Best of Nature to this journal club if they find any there whose writing style seems good.
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Replies
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Maxine,
I’ve added the Watson and Crick paper to the Best of Nature section. There are surprisingly few papers in that section.
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It probably needs more work from us at Nature to encourage readers to nominate/comment, and to generally raise the profile of the feature. Unfortunately, there are just so many things to do….but it would be great if Nature Network members of this group could help to populate the site.
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This week I bought the book A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries. A lot of the content is also available at the link above. Similar to Best of Nature, the book contains 21 classic papers from the 20th century. Each paper is put into the historical context in an accompaniying essay.
Very interesting reading, for example that the famous last sentence of the Watson and Crick paper (It has not escaped our notice…) was a compromise between the two authors. That essay can be found here1953commentary.pdf.
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I can’t figure out how to add something but I wanted to add Maiman’s paper on the first laser, initially rejected by Science if I remember correctly.
doi: 10.1038/187493a0
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