Titles

This is not about knights and dames, nor is it about jazz musicians, such as Duke Ellington or Court Basie. Rather, it is about a most important issue in science, which is the difficult task of choosing titles for seminars, lectures, scientific papers, books and even the titles of the journals themselves. Today, we all have to compete for readers and listeners, and in the current ruthlessly competitive market conditions, a boring title will not be much help. Once upon a time, everything was simpler. Journals had straightforward names like the Journal of Physiology or the Biochemical Journal. Notice that these journals are British: their founders saw no need to add a national descriptor, having got in first. There are similar journals in other countries; in the USA, for example, we have the American Journal of Human Genetics. An interesting question is whether " American " journals were named out of national pride, or to get the journals to the top of any alphabetical listings, where they would be more visible. Not quite to the top, of course, but there could hardly be much competition from Albania, which is not renowned for its scientific research. In Germany, many of the early journals were called after their founders, who personally owned the journal: Hoppe-Seyler, Roux, Virchow and Liebig had their Zeitschrifts, Arkivs and Annalen. Those were also the days when one wrote papers with straightforward titles, often numbered (in Latin, of course) in series; so we published Biochemical Detoxification CCLXII and Chymotrypsin Inhibitors DCIX. All of this changed quite suddenly in the early sixties. A new style of writing emerged, which I will call the Massachusetts Declarative because it began in Cambridge, Mass. Its origin, I believe, can be traced to Jim Watson's book The Molecular Biology of the Gene. No longer did one write " Experimental evidence for the role of the ribosome in protein synthesis " , but rather " The ribosome is the seat of protein synthesis ". The cringing style of writing that gave us " The evidence of the present findings does not lend support to the conclusion of Spiegelberg et al. that DNA is replicated in the Golgi apparatus " has gone; today, we can say " Spiegelberg et al. are wrong ". I find that being able to refer to myself as " I " rather than as " the present author " is …