The Story behind the Science: Shining a light on the path to discovery
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: history, editorial, respiratory syncytial virus R esearchers turn to scientific literature to inform themselves and stay up to date on the newest developments in their field by reading research articles and reviews.They also contribute to the body of work by publishing their own research results or writing expert reviews.It is standard practice for scientific articles, whether they report original research or evaluate progress on the current state of a scientific discipline, to purely focus on the science.For research articles, authors generally start out with relevant background information on a given topic to provide the lay of the land before introducing the purpose and hypothesis of their own work.In subsequent sections, authors describe the materials and methods used in the experiments in meticulous detail and then present and discuss their research results.Review articles usually provide an overview of a specific research topic or field and describe current progress.However, research papers are usually written in a manner divorced from the actual conduct of research, which is often messy and seldom follows a linear trajectory from hypothesis to discovery.This led Peter Medawar to question whether the typical scientific paper was a fraud (1) since it presented an account of discovery that was very different from what actually happened in laboratory research.What the scientific literature does not capture is what happens behind the scenes, i.e., the backstory of a scientific breakthrough, such as personal anecdotes or the serendip ity that often accompanies discoveries.This information is usually known only to the participants in the discovery and is passed down in an oral tradition to collaborators and trainees.However, like all oral histories, it is vulnerable to the passing of time and the participants.To address this gap in the field of microbiology, mBio introduces a new article series called "The Story behind the Science" that will feature papers discussing the history of a discovery or of a microbiology subfield and bring to light information generally not available in the literature.We are interested in anecdotes, human stories, unrecorded details, reminiscences, coincidences, serendipity, and any other ingredient that led to a major discovery.All papers in this series will be collated into an ongoing article collection that can be found on the journal's collection page (https://journals.asm.org/journal/mbio/collections).The Story behind the Science papers are a subset of the journal's Commentary article type and are 1,000-1,500 words in length.Recently, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health was designated by the American Society for Microbiology as a "Milestones in Microbiology" site for its contributions to microbiology and immunology.When the history of the department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology was researched for the application, it was learned that respiratory syncytial virus, commonly known as RSV, had been discovered in 1957 in the department as part of a collaboration between the laboratories of Drs.Robert Chanock and Bernard Roizman (2).This information was largely unknown to the
Source: mBio
Authors: Arturo Casadevall, Lorraine F. Clark
Institutions: Johns Hopkins University, American Society for Microbiology
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,900
OpenAlex ID: W4406670752