Lesley Anson
Freelance scientific editor and publishing consultant
lesley.anson@gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.100.36

Like many scientists, I suspect, I’ve always considered myself lucky in that I’m paid to do my hobby. I’m not a practising scientist any more, but as a scientific editor, I remain deeply immersed in the world of scientific endeavour and, in particular, its communication to a wide audience. I’m often asked about the route I took and the decisions I made to become an editor. But in truth, my career has evolved organically thanks to a handful of influential mentors, a dose of gut instinct and a little bit of luck.

It was at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne where I first experienced the thrill of scientific research whilst a physiology undergraduate. Lectures were held in the very centre of the department, so we were literally surrounded by laboratories where PhD students and postdocs could be seen beavering away on their experiments. It was in these laboratories where we were to taste what life was like as a working scientist during our final year projects and, in my case, a vacation project funded by The Society under the watchful eye of Jim Gillespie (and The Society’s dog – Jim was Society Secretary at the time). In this stimulating environment, I discovered that scientific research was fun, interesting and, crucially, something that seemed achievable.

As I was finishing my BSc, I became excited by the prospect of measuring current flow through individual ion channels in real time using the then recently-described patch clamp technique. So I contacted as many people as I could find in the UK who were ‘patching’ to ask if they’d consider taking me as a PhD student. To my surprise and delight, I received several positive responses, and eventually chose to work on an innovative project on cochlear inner hair cells with Jonathan Ashmore at the University of Bristol. Jonathan’s enthusiasm for science was infectious, and with the support of a very active department whose coffee room formed its pulse, I graduated as an independent thinker after three very enjoyable (and challenging) years.

During the course of my PhD studies, I used patches of membrane containing NMDA receptors as a bioassay for glutamate. So when a postdoctoral opportunity arose to study these channels at the most precise biophysical level imaginable (at that time), I seized it, and joined David Colquhoun’s laboratory at University College, London. This was what I had dreamed about – spending my days recording and analysing conformational changes in single molecules. But two papers were published during this time that greatly influenced my next career move: the first high-resolution structure of an ion channel (Doyle et al., 1998) and, soon after, the structure of the ligand binding domain of a glutamate receptor (Armstrong et al., 2008). At the time, I was already looking at alternative careers in science, having realised that running a lab wasn’t readily compatible with starting a family. But these two papers opened my eyes to the brave new world of membrane protein X-ray crystallography and also the thrill of reading the kind of landmark paper that significantly influences thinking in a field. Shortly after, I left the lab to pursue an editorial career at Nature.

In the years that followed, I became immersed in manuscripts describing other people’s endeavours from fields as diverse as chronobiology, synaptic physiology and, naturally, ion channel biophysics. I filtered, peer-reviewed and accepted for publication numerous papers that were, in my opinion, landmarks in their field. Not a day passed when I didn’t feel the buzz, and the responsibility, of handling some of the best science being done at the time. The job was varied, which meant that I could be writing copy for the journal in the morning (Anson 1999, 2002, 2006), and engaging with a reviewer about the technical aspects of a manuscript in the afternoon. I learned about a great many more fields of science than I’d ever imagined I would and, most excitingly, I became embedded in the membrane protein biophysics field during one of its most exciting times and added structural biology to my dinner conversations. Although I was not practising science myself any more, I was able to engage with scientific progress in what felt like a meaningful way.

Of course, being a print journal, there was a limit to the number of papers that Nature could publish every week, and it was a genuine shame to have to reject many wonderful manuscripts. So when the publishers decided to launch a new, online-only journal to complement, but not compete with, the other Nature journals, I began work on building what was to become Nature Communications. The goal of this new journal was to publish important pieces of work, following rigorous peer review, that wouldn’t necessarily have the kind of broad appeal that papers published in other Nature journals had. And it seemed that there was an abundance of such papers across the natural sciences – so much so that in five short years the journal grew to publish more than 300 papers a month, swelled its editorial staff to 40 and received an Impact Factor of 11.47. I had landed myself with the most exhilarating Chief Editor role imaginable. I discovered how rewarding it could be to manage a team – watching scientists grow into scientific editors was most gratifying – and act as a mentor for new managers. I also experienced The journal change to an open-access business model and participated in debates and interviews about open access, including on BBC Radio 4.

As I write, however, I am embarking on an exciting new chapter in my career as a freelance scientific editor and publishing consultant, which will bring me closer to the community from which I originated. I will be helping scientists to write research papers in a clear, concise and impactful way; providing advice about communicating with editors and referees through cover letters and responses to referees; and developmentally editing review articles to maximise their accessibility. I consider myself privileged to have accumulated the skills and experience to do this by working for some of the best scientists, universities and journals in the world and very lucky to do what I enjoy for the community that shaped my career.

References

Doyle DA et al (1998). The structure of the potassium channel: molecular basis of K⁺ conduction and selectivity. Science 280, 69-77.

Armstrong N, Sun Y., Chen G-Q & Gouaux E (1998). Structure of a glutamate-receptor ligand-binding core in complex with kainate. Nature 395, 913-917.

Anson L (1999). Ion channels: common origins. Nature 402, 739.

Anson L (2002). Neurobiology: the bitter-sweet taste of amino acids. Nature 416, 136.

Anson L (2006). Physiology: channelled pain. Nature 444, 156.