Review of scientific manuscripts

While reading an editorial of Maddox [Nature. 1995 Dec 7; 378(6557):521-3], I found the following comment quite interesting:

It's a good joke (which I have often used) that Watson and Crick's paper on the structure of DNA could not be published now. If is only necessary to imagine what people would say if it reached them in the mail: "It's all model-building, just speculation, and such data they have are not theirs but Rosalind Franklin's!" Some would complain that the sentence beginning, "It has not escaped our attention..." is certainly unsubstantiated, and must be an attempt to claim credit for developments in genetics that lies years ahead.

Maddox continued to imagine what could have happened behind the scene that led to the publication of Watson and Crick's paper, together with Franklin's crucial experimental work illustrating the helical signature of crystalline DNA.

In some sense (to my understanding), Watson and Crick were lucky, not only in that they solved the puzzle of DNA structure elegantly by connecting the various experimental pieces together, but also they worked in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University and had the support from Sir Lawrence Bragg. One could easily imagine what would have happened if they did this work in a not so famous lab, without support from a leading, powerful figure.

In a scientific field (e.g. RNA), what appears to be a common sense, a decade old issue, could have something significant when view from a novel perspective. Such unconventional results, however, are often hard to get across the review process, especially for new comers to a field and without backing of big names. In principle, the reviewers should be fair to the author, being specific with his/her comments, especially in case of negative ones. That would be far more convincing to the authors than some vague, general remarks. As a general rule, I won't accept to review a manuscript for a journal unless I have time to read it thorough carefully, and the expertise to understand the details, in order to provide some concrete comments.

In this regard, it is worth reading the essay by Keith Manchester titled "Historical Opinion: Erwin Chargaff and his 'rules' for the base composition of DNA: why did he fail to see the possibility of complementarity?" [Trends Biochem Sci. 2008 Feb;33(2):65-70]. For completeness, the abstract is quoted below:

Erwin Chargaff was one of the more interesting and colourful figures of the historic decade that heralded the proposal of the double helical structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953. In describing Chargaff's important contribution to the study of DNA, particularly its base composition, this article seeks to suggest why, despite his substantial achievements, he failed to anticipate some of the key features of the Watson-Crick model, particularly complementarity between bases--a failure that left him deeply embittered for the rest of his life.