Listening to Your Arrangements

Dr. Matt Harris, editor-in-chief of the life sciences division at Nature, had specialized in genetic engineering before becoming editor-in-chief. After receiving the paper "Rat Studies Using Multiple SHANK3 Gene-Editing Methods" from the Shen Qi Team, he spent an entire day reviewing it.

"The editing methods used by the Shen Qi Team are fairly novel, but isn't the observation period for the rats too short?" Editor-in-Chief Harris was an expert himself. He was intrigued by the team's editing methods, but had doubts about how long they had observed the rats.

When conducting gene editing on rats, researchers should observe them throughout their entire lifespans, and even study their offspring.

The Shen Qi Team had observed the rats for only a few months before writing the paper. Wasn't that a little hasty?

Of course, at the end of the paper, the Shen Qi Team had also written: "This experiment has yielded preliminary findings. In the next stage, we will continue monitoring various indicators in the experimental rats and conduct a more in-depth study of how the SHANK3 gene works."

Editor-in-Chief Harris fell into thought. "If this were anyone else, I wouldn't send the paper out for peer review. Strictly speaking, from a genomics perspective, the experimental rats should be observed for at least their entire lives before any conclusions are drawn. But Shen Qi is a major figure. He's won the Nobel Prize three times and the Fields Medal once, and he's a foreign member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. A paper by someone of his stature should be handled specially. Otherwise, if I offend Shen Qi, he might favor Science or Cell in the future."

In the broad scientific community, Science was Nature's main competitor.

In the life sciences, Nature's main competitors were also Science and Cell.

These prestigious journals