
Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal - ohaikbai
https://www.news18.com/news/world/27-year-old-letter-reveals-scientist-peter-ratcliffes-nobel-prize-winning-study-was-rejected-by-journal-2344475.html
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btilly
That's nothing.

The most extreme such example is that everything that Barbara McClintock
published for decades about jumping genes was questioned because it seemed
like an impossible result. It got so bad that she stopped even trying to
submit papers for publication anywhere after 1953. Then in the 1960s and 1970s
the mechanics of transposons was discovered and she became hailed as a pioneer
and was awarded the Nobel.

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock)
for more.

~~~
dr_coffee
That is indeed an extreme example, given how matter of factly they teach
transposons in molecular bio these days.

When we couldn't get a paper published, my old PI would always joke, "There's
always BBRC!", referring to the journal biochemical and biophysical research
communications. The impact factor was and still is quite low, and it would
make the post docs bristle when he said it.

But I once asked him, why BBRC? and he explained that Aaron Ciechanover and
Avram Herschko published their first paper on ubiquitinylation (how proteins
get tagged for degradation in the proteasome) in that journal [1,2]. It won
them a Nobel prize 26 years later and exploded into a huge field. You just
never know sometimes.

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26325464/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26325464/)

[2]
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0006291X78...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0006291X78912494)

(The BBRC text is paywalled sorry)

~~~
JorgeGT
There are many prestigious/important journals within specific fields with very
low IF. For instance in acoustics the _Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America_ or _Acta Acustica united with Acustica_.

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chrisseaton
It doesn't say it explicitly in the article, but I guess the idea behind
people sharing this story is to laugh at the original reviewer's foolishness,
ignorance, or arrogance for rejecting Nobel quality work.

But it isn't that simple. What was the context in which the original work was
presented? Does the Nobel Committee know more now than the reviewer did at the
time? Maybe the original paper wasn't written well enough to sufficiently
explain the full potential of the idea?

Rejection is usually a case of 'I'm not sufficiently sure this is good enough
given the information I have in front of me', not 'I'm positive this isn't
good enough even with hindsight from the future'.

I think the tone is a little unfair and unreasonable.

~~~
throwaway_law
>Rejection is usually a case of 'I'm not sufficiently sure this is good enough
given the information I have in front of me'

Last week there were a few articles about the rejection of numerous
articles/papers that would go on to win the Nobel Prize.

Obviously this is a very small set, but goes to show how easily Nobel Prize
winning papers could have been lost to history.

The rejections include everything from:

-reviewers not liking the name of the paper (politics/subjectivity at its worst...I think the journal was trying to take an active role in the propagation of the prevailing terms regarding the subject matter)

-Not the right journal for the topic (quasi-subjective and potentially political)

-a backlog of articles to be published (maybe a little subjective, not sure if the examiner(s)/publisher(s) could have shuffled things around, but that would get back into subjectivity/politics)

In most cases, as you can imagine, the authors were disheartened and
frustrated. Some never even published again as a result of these experiences.
To me it just makes me wonder how many papers/articles could/would/should have
won the Nobel Prize but for some rejection, and as a result how much
time/effort has been lost.

~~~
mcguire
"Obviously this is a very small set?"

Nobel Prizes, by definition, are given for groundbreaking results. Almost by
definition, most "groundbreaking" results are wrong. Even given everything
else as equal, it is unsurprising that Nobel-winning results are rejected at
least once.

~~~
throwaway_law
To the best of my knowledge 8 papers were rejected that ultimately won the
prize...over 500 Nobel Prizes have been awarded so I am not sure why you
expect papers to get rejected at least once.

Again the basis of these rejections were not on the merits (or results) as you
suggest, rather, because of issues with names of the papers, backlog, and
deferring to other journals which may be better fits for the topic.

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JorgeGT
Nature also rejected Fermi's paper on weak interaction ("contained
speculations too remote from reality to be of interest to the reader") and
Kreb's paper about the citric acid cycle ("It is undesirable to accept further
letters at the present time") — both investigation would end winning the
Nobel.

~~~
Alex3917
Karl von Frisch's Nobel-winning biology paper was rejected everywhere he
submitted it also.

~~~
JorgeGT
To be fair, bees doing cute little dance moves to talk to each other _does_
sound pretty crazy.

~~~
mamon
It wouldn't sound that crazy if Nobel Commitee members watched more musicals
:)

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shadowgovt
It's inspiring to observe how long the path can be between initial forays (or
even middle-career forays) and publicly-recognized success.

This seems a relatively universal truism with only rare exceptions (too rare
to bet one's future on, certainly). I'm reminded of the video of Lin Manuel-
Miranda performing at the White House Poetry Jam in 2009
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNFf7nMIGnE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNFf7nMIGnE)].

The work he presented was already pretty well-polished, and the musical that
included it wouldn't open for another six years.

~~~
lonelappde
In Miranda's case, it's a weakness in the format. He couldn't really publish a
string of 30 songs about Hamilton's life over a 10 year career as a pop bard,
but plenty of musicians do that on similar works of art. But packing them into
one blockbuster she works.

* Then again, people do it in TV format, like Flight of the Conchords and Crazy Ex Girlfriend.

------
ascertain
This shows the letter:
[https://twitter.com/pipcosper/status/1182799512621977600](https://twitter.com/pipcosper/status/1182799512621977600)

~~~
danieltillett
Not only did they reject the article, they sat on for ages. Great work Nature.

------
jessriedel
Looks like most people here recognize it's silly to think Nature was foolish
for not always recognizing Nobel-prize-worthy work when it first appeared.
(The journal might be foolish for plenty of other reasons, of course.) But for
those who are still surprised, you should just think of this like making fun
of VCs for not recognizing the future success of AirBnB (or whatever your
perferred example start-up that seemed weird/unpromising but turned out to be
wildly successful). This stuff always seems obvious in hindsight.

------
dekhn
What I'm trying to understand is: do large numbers of people believe the work
that goes on to the Nobel Prize should be recognized as such when it is
originally published?

Put another way: could you train a binary classifier (NOBEL/NOTBEL) that
predicted prizewinning status at journal submission time based on the
information bits available in the article? (personally I really doubt it)

~~~
mattkrause
That's a tough questions.

When you put it like that, no, obviously not, or at least not always.

On the other hand, a lot of academia is predicated on the idea that the
quality and impact of research and by extension, the researcher, is
immediately apparent, so we're "correctly" selecting and rewarding the best
people. Stuff like this suggests that we're not, and the moves towards
relentless up-or-out pipelines (with fixed times at each stage) might be
counterproductive.

~~~
dekhn
I think there are many things that, when published in the context of the day,
_are not distinguishable_ from other work in terms of "Nobelity". It seems
like most impact is measured decades after an initial technology is
discovered, reported, and published. CRISPR seems like a relative outlier
(once the basic technique was perfected, it went from "nothing" to
"everything" in just a few years, and has now completely changed the nature of
biomedical research).

~~~
lonelappde
CRISPR isn't an outlier, it's a product of our modern fast moving tech world.
If CRISPR were invented in 1950, all else equal,it would have moved much more
slowly.

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habnds
It would be more surprising if it _wasn't_ rejected at least once.

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d--b
> The journal in 1992 had concluded that Ratcliffe's study was unfit for
> publication as the direction of research was something which was beyond
> their understanding.

I think that this is a fair reason for rejecting a paper...

> “Given the discrepancy mentioned by reviewer 1, we have sadly concluded, on
> balance, that your paper would be better placed in a more specialised
> journal, particularly given the competition for space,”

Yes, that's kind of good advice too...

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beerandt
I always assumed this was standard, at least for all the larger journals.

Similar to the way patents used to be. Expect to be rejected multiple times,
while tweaking and submitting additional info. That's essentially what the
editing process was.

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southerndrift
Hasn't Maxwell not mentioned Maxwell's equations when giving a speech about
the state of the art of science? If a great scientist can be unsure about a
theory, it's not surprising that an average reviewer can be, too.

~~~
btilly
My favorite variation was David Hilbert asking in a talk what "Hilbert Spaces"
were.

In his defense, they were named after him by someone else. But it was still a
funny irony.

~~~
lonelappde
From Hilbert's perspective, he did a lot of work that he cared about, but one
random thing got his name on it out of proportion to his own sense of what his
important about himself. That's disorienting.

Gauss avoided this problem by getting everything named after him.

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acd10j
That is why need arxiv like pre-print system for every scientific field, So
even if a paper is rejected it is still widely available, readable and
reference able.

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k__
How many people are smart enough to produce such work, let alone to see it's
brilliance?

Reviwers aren't all geniuses....

------
planetzero
They nominated Obama simply because he won over Bush and before he was even in
office. I have lost faith in the Noble prize system as a whole.

~~~
doubleunplussed
*Nobel, and for what it's worth, the peace prize was added after Alfred Nobel's death and is considered by many not to serve the same purpose at the other Nobel prizes, and so it has a different reputation. It is sometimes used as a nudge to people who have the power to do good things, rather than as recognition after the fact.

~~~
opo
All of the Nobel prizes were established after his death.

~~~
doubleunplussed
Well, he established them in his will. I was under the impression that the
Peace prize was not in his will, but I just looked it up on wikipedia and it
was. Looks like I got it confused with the "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic
Sciences", which shares his name and is administered by the same committee,
but was established by others.

