Are we making progress?

Excerpt

Almost every day, large numbers of articles come to our desk or computers. It is impossible to read everything that is interesting, important, or relevant. It is even impossible to select what is important or relevant. We rely on the editors of journals, writers of reviews, or presenters at congresses to select what is important and not. And we realize (hopefully) that some work in important journals is not so relevant and work from unknown persons in less prestigious journals can be groundbreaking. At the fortunate age of almost 60, there is lot to look back on, and a nice example of that notion comes from own experience. When we discovered in the late 1980s of the previous millennium that healthy individuals can have cancer-associated translocations, we had a great difficulty in publishing our article. After rejection by several high-impact journals, we finally had it in the public domain and our data were rapidly confirmed. When I presented the work with some more details and further discoveries a year later, the notion that a genetic alteration does not mean there is cancer was so common knowledge that my presentation was not felt as something new. Just a year before, the article had been rejected with a note from the editor that he did not know what we did wrong but that it was impossible that a translocation could be present in a person without cancer. If you find something that does not fit into the concept of a reviewer or editor, it is not so easy to get your data published. …