Inside Nature: Henry Gee at the UCL Grant Museum of Zoology

Jack Ashby, Learning and Access Manager at the UCL Grant Museum of Zoology, reflects on the working life of one of the gatekeepers of the world's scientific knowledge: Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee, who spoke at the museum on 26 October. 'Although by far the strongest emotion I experienced whilst programming and marketing Henry Gee's talk was excitement - in the fact that we had an engaging, funny and influential scientist visiting - I was also nervous that it could all go horribly wrong. Dr Henry Gee is Senior Editor (Biological Sciences) for Nature . Along with the other Senior Editors, he is the guy who receives people's article submissions for one of the most distinguished journals in the world and decides whether to accept or reject them. As such he is a gatekeeper for what the world gets to hear about ' an extremely powerful person. According to Henry, who gave a talk at the Grant Museum of Zoology to give an insight to his work, Nature receives 200 manuscripts per week - that's 10,400 every year ' but of these only ten a week get published. In other words, authors have a 95% failure rate at getting across Henry's desk. He freely admits that he ruins people's prospects of tenure. What I was nervous about was that people would want revenge. Prior to the Grant Museum's public events I ask colleagues working in relevant disciplines to send on notices about the event to their departments. On this occasion I got several replies along the lines of 'Looks good, Jack - will you be providing the rotten tomatoes or should we bring our own??