A Personal Creation: * Fifty Years of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

When I first met Mattia Gallotti in February 2025, two months into his stint as the fifth of this journal's Editors-in-Chief, he remarked how much the history of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (ISR) had been defined by individuals, to a degree unexpected in an academic journal. My justification for this unashamedly personal contribution to ISR's 50th anniversary issue is that in my three decades of involvement with the journal, I have known and worked with a good number of them. From the start of 2002 until the summer of 2008 I was ISR's Editor-in-Chief (or plain ‘Editor’, as the first three of us were known), and before that was employed in the then in-house editorial department of the then Institute of Materials. I worked closely with both my predecessors as Editor, and persuaded my immediate successor onto the editorial board at the start of my own tenure in 2002. In attempting to sketch what the latest Editor-in-Chief suggested might amount to an ‘intellectual history’ of ISR, what follows is thus very largely a story of individuals, of their involvement with the journal, and of their commitment to the ‘interdisciplinary science’ which its Founding Editor, Dr Anthony Rowland Michaelis, set out to promote and advance.

The phrase ‘Interdisciplinary Science’, or ‘interdisciplinary science’ (the upper case used for emphasis more than definition) appears in a blurb put together in ISR's early days by Michaelis and his co-founder and first publisher Gunter Heyden, in which the journal was said to be ‘creating a new discipline, Interdisciplinary Science, essential for the solution of the great problems facing mankind’ (Michaelis 2001, 346). The formulation is interesting for what it suggests the title of the new journal might have been intended to convey, and about the work ISR was intended to do, not as an interdisciplinary journal of the sciences, but as a journal of interdisciplinary science. Beyond Michaelis's very first editorial, of which more below, direct treatments of what that might actually have meant have been conspicuous by their absence from ISR's pages. In practice, as the same blurb set out, the journal aimed to feature papers in three categories, on ‘border areas between two or more sciences’, on ‘the effects of science and technology on Society’, and ‘linking the sciences with the arts and the humanities’ (Michaelis 2001, 346). Over the years, those three headings have remained as fair a guide to its content as any other, and the journal's reach has remained as broad as their combined scope suggests. For Michaelis and his successors, what those headings have provided is the latitude to chart an interdisciplinary course through the sciences, generously defined, in line with our own particular predilections and biases.

The only developed statement of Michaelis's understanding of the interdisciplinary character of his ‘new discipline’ was published in this journal's inaugural editorial, in March 1976:

Interdisciplinary work originates from the joint and continuously integrated effort of two or more specialists having a different disciplinary background and training. The results resemble a chemical compound … It differs from Multidisciplinary work, where collaboration, often in parallel, leads to a physical mixture … The properties of a compound transcend those of its elemental parts, whereas those of a mixture never do (Michaelis 1976, 1)

This definition, striking in its clarity, seems to be his own; at least, the editorial is unreferenced, and gives no other indication how it might have been derived. At a time when discourse around interdisciplinary approaches and their meaning was in its infancy, in the non-social sciences particularly, it may seem surprising that no attempt was made to justify this definition. However, in setting out his interdisciplinary commitments, Michaelis was founding no ordinary scholarly journal, and was himself in no sense a conventional academic editor. His trade was science communication; he had edited Discovery: the magazine of scientific progress in the 1950s, and from 1963 to 1973 was scientific correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph. Launched in 1976 at the age of 60, when he was at a loose end following his departure from Fleet Street, this journal was in effect his retirement project, if an unusually ambitious one. ¹

But then Michaelis was never short on ambition. I have recently acquired one of the medals commissioned in 1991 from Monnaie de Paris (the French Mint), in celebration of his achievements up to his 75th birthday, all under the rubric ‘Scientia Communicavi’, ‘I have communicated science’. The list runs as follows: Director of Research at Milton Antiseptic (1943–1947), author of the first book on Research Films (1956), Editor of Discovery (1956–1960), Director of Scientific Information at CIBA (1960–1962), Scientific Correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph (1963–1973), President of the Astrolabe Society of London (1965) and of its international sister (1991), founder and Editor of this journal (1976–1996). The medal, the enclosed note says, was struck at the instigation of ‘gracious friends’. That may be so, but the note and medal are Michaelis through and through: the ‘obverse’, says the note, ‘is clear, AET is an abbreviation of AETATIS, age’; clear, that is, unless you have the disbenefit of not knowing Latin, in which case you deserve the kindness of a translation.

I got to know Anthony Michaelis (1916–2008) in the first few years of my involvement with this journal, and in the last few of his life, just as he had turned from Editor to Founding Editor. He was a large man, in every sense. The first time I remember meeting him, he had just climbed three flights of stairs to the top of 1 Carlton House Terrace, the grandly proportioned Nash house overlooking The Mall which was at that time home to the then Institute of Materials. The lift was temporarily out of action, and at a youthful 80, he saw no need to hang about, appearing nonchalantly in the publishing department chewing what appeared to be a blade of grass. He was someone with that unshakeable confidence in science ‘as humanity's greatest source for good’ (Smith 2008) which was widespread in the post-war years, but seems quite uncritical, ² almost quaint, now. Thus the to him evidently unproblematic inclusion in an early editorial of the atom bomb in a list of ‘technological triumphs’, on the basis that the ‘management requirements of the Manhattan Project were as exacting as those of the Apollo Programme’ and of the ‘benefits to mankind of civil nuclear power’, a ‘direct consequence of this military State enterprise’ (Michaelis 1977b, 266).

Whilst Michaelis knew that science and technology were powers for good with unlimited potential to improve the lot of humanity, he also knew from his own experience that humanity itself had similarly boundless potential for ill. What appeared to be his own boundless confidence, in himself, and in science and technology, had grown out of adversity in the trajectory of his own earlier life, born and growing up in well-to-do 1920s Germany, but then uprooted to England (London, mainly) following his exile as a teenage refugee in the 1930s. The Berlin-raised only child of a non-practising Jewish physician father and a Lutheran sculptor mother, and with three Jewish grandparents, Michaelis was despatched by his father to London at the age of 17, to continue his scientific education away from the rise of the Nazis. Entering Imperial College in 1934 to read aeronautical engineering, he soon switched to chemistry, having failed his first-year maths exam, and went on to a PhD in pigment chemistry under Patrick Linstead (later Sir Patrick Linstead, FRS, Rector of Imperial), awarded in 1940. Thus set for a career in chemical research, what really changed the direction of his life was internment.

When war broke out, Michaelis was judged to be a category C refugee, that is innocent and representing no risk to national security. His situation changed radically on Sunday 12 May 1940, when along with all other German emigrés, in all risk categories, he was interned as an enemy alien. This changed Michaelis's life in two fundamental respects. The first was through the loss of his father, who committed suicide in July 1940, Michaelis always assumed because he had mistakenly understood his son to be sailing with other internees on the SS Arandora Star, torpedoed off the coast of Ireland with many lives lost; this in practice left him without family, his mother having died from pneumonia in 1929. The second was through friendships he formed while interned, with the likes of Max Perutz (1962 Nobel laureate in chemistry), Hermann Bondi and Tommy Gold (originators of the ‘steady-state’ theory of the universe), Peter Trier (Director of the Mullard Research Laboratories), Walter Wallich (pioneer of British ‘phone-in’ radio) and Paul Feiler (leading member of the ‘St Ives’ school of artists). A number of these friends later became loyal and long-serving members of this journal's editorial board. The extent of Michaelis's connections at the highest levels of international science thus had a very long pedigree, tied up with his own complex back-story as a pre-war German emigré.

Michaelis titled his memoirs, if that is the right term for such an eclectic, magpie volume, The Scientific Temper. The subtitle, ‘An anthology of stories on matters of science’, is rather more revealing of the content, which is made up of what the author calls 440 ‘Titles’, each a ‘story deal[ing] with science and … an example of the Scientific Temper’ (Michaelis 2001, 1) and amounting to at most a printed page of text. In fact, the division into Titles is more haphazard, with the basic numerical sequence interrupted by a number of ‘A’ and ‘B’ Titles, and some ‘stories’ (e.g., ‘Author's Bibliography’) split across multiple Titles. However, the overall intent is clear, to reflect a lifelong commitment to ‘the application of reason to human affairs and a disinterested search for truth’ (Michaelis 2001, V). The Scientific Temper is compendiously indexed. What is revealing in the context of the history of this journal is that whilst ‘interdisciplinary’ is indexed to dozens of pages, the term ‘interdisciplinarity’ is indexed to only three. Moreover two of those references turn out to be to two separate mentions of the same event, or perhaps more accurately in Michaelis's estimation ‘non-event’, a seminar he was invited to organise in July 1981 on the theme of interdisciplinarity ‘but [which he] failed to make … a success’. Frustratingly, no more is said on the matter, except that ‘no publication resulted’ (Michaelis 2001, 324, 367).

As Michaelis admits in a telling passage in The Scientific Temper, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews was in fact a second choice for the name of his journal: his preference would have been to launch it under the banner International Science Reviews, but that turned out already to be in use. Much taken by that stage with the ‘admirable’ short title ‘ISR’, ‘another adjective beginning with “I”’ was required, and so it was that this ISR was born. If this account is to be taken at face value, we are left with the conundrum that the interdisciplinary nature of his journal appears to have been almost an afterthought, driven in part by the desire for a catchy acronym, and making the clarity and confidence of that opening definition even more striking. He does, nonetheless, go on to state that the journal was founded in the conviction ‘that interdisciplinary articles were much needed and not catered for in the then existing scientific literature’, and so the interdisciplinary commitment is real, however apparently happenstantial the term's inclusion in ISR's title (Michaelis 2001, 310).

In one important respect, Michaelis would no longer recognise his journal. For the first 28 years of its existence, its format was A4, with two columns of text under a full-width abstract, the still largely normative guise of ‘hard’ science journals. It was also heavily illustrated, often with the familiar scientific apparatus of graphs and tables, and including author photos, a convention continuing up to the end of the A4 era in December 2003, two years into my time as Editor. From the outset it was, very intentionally, a journal of science, even if in an uncommon mould; just as Michaelis was, fundamentally, a man of science. And though by birth German, and educated in Germany until despatched to London in September 1933, what he understood by ‘science’, even judging by his own gloss on the Latin ‘scientia’ in the context of his 75th birthday medal, was primarily the natural sciences. In establishing this journal, his intention was to stimulate interest in ‘interdisciplinary science’, ‘above all’ out of a ‘deep concern with the future progress of science for the future benefit of all mankind’ (Michaelis 2001, 346). Though entirely convinced of the value and intellectual excitement inherent in interdisciplinary approaches, Michaelis had no special interest in interdisciplinarity as such: his commitment was essentially to science.

The fact that ISR exists at all is testament to Michaelis's lifetime of international networking in science. As by then Sir Hermann Bondi, a founding member of the editorial board, said on the occasion of his retirement as Editor in 1996, ‘it takes an effort to realise that its existence … is due to the imaginative and sustained effort of one person’, a person with ‘the persuasive power to assemble’ an editorial board of 69 members, drawn from 15 countries (Bondi 1996). This was also someone with the self-confidence to deliver a first issue including welcome messages from the presidents of the Royal Society of London, the US National Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Society; not to mention a later contribution by former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (Schmidt 1982), and a 10th anniversary issue opening with a message of congratulation from the Duke of Edinburgh. Not only that, but many of those first editorial board members were scientific heavyweights of comparable distinction to Bondi himself, themselves amongst the most widely connected in their fields: figures like Konrad Bloch (Nobel Prize-winning biochemist), Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (founder of population genetics), Hilde Himmelweit (pioneering social psychologist), Peter Medawar (Nobel Prize-winning immunologist) and Abdus Salam (Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist).

Amongst the out and out scientists on that inaugural editorial board, there were a smattering of others, no less eminent and perhaps still more widely connected. So in the listing on the inside front cover between Cavalli-Sforza and Friedrich Cramer (chemist and philosopher of science) came Michael Collins, the US astronaut who flew the Apollo 11 command module around the moon in 1969 while Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on its surface; between Himmelweit and Otto Kinne (marine biologist) was Alexander King, co-founder of the Club of Rome and pioneer of the sustainable development movement; soon to be joined by the likes of Hans Mark (Secretary of the US Air Force), Dillon Ripley (Secretary of the Smithsonian) and Heather, later Baroness, Brigstocke (High Mistress of St Paul's Girls’ School) (see Michaelis 2001, 330, 333, 337). The impression such names might give is of a largely ornamental board, but this was often far from the truth. In remarkable witness to the regard in which Michaelis was held, many editorial board members were actively involved in the life of the journal, turning out to meetings; reviewing submissions under Michaelis's ‘modified referee system’ ³ (Michaelis 2001, 339); even contributing articles, in particular on the occasion of an 80th birthday, when it became customary for ISR to republish a paper of a given board member's choosing (Michaelis 2001, 447).

If Michaelis's starting point in establishing ISR was an express commitment to ‘interdisciplinary’ science in the sense articulated in his first editorial, other early editorials tend to locate the significance of interdisciplinary science more specifically in the collaboration of scientists with politicians and policymakers, for example:

The most important interdisciplinary task facing mankind [sic] is collaboration between scientists and politicians (Michaelis 1977a, 91)

From the start, the published content ranged much more widely: the first volume included, amongst many others, papers on the Oklo natural nuclear reactors (issue 1), ‘music of the spheres’ (issue 2), interdisciplinary research in US universities (issue 3) and the design of spider webs (issue 4); volume 2 contributions on for example desertification and atomic weights (issue 1), the Antarctic ocean and Gothic masonry (issue 2), mathematics of cipher machines and 17th-century natural philosophy (issue 3), cryogenics and scientific curiosity (issue 4). In practice, what Michaelis was interested in publishing was what he himself found interesting. An interdisciplinary slant was important, but there were few limits to his interpretation of what that might mean: ‘Nothing could have been more interdisciplinary’, he enthuses, ‘than the contribution [to volume 6, issue 3] called *The Car and Its Artists*’ ⁴ (Michaelis 2001, 361). Moreover, despite his association of interdisciplinary approaches with joint working between ‘two or more specialists’, multiauthor papers are comparatively rare.

Unsurprisingly, ISR was never a moneyspinner, for Michaelis or his first publisher (Michaelis 2001, 366). In May 1982, it was acquired along with the rest of Heyden's publishing business by John Wiley & Sons, but within three issues it had been offloaded, and from issue 2 of volume 8 the journal's printers, J.W. Arrowsmith of Bristol, also became its publishers. Matters came to a head financially in 1990, when Arrowsmiths decided to put ISR up for public auction; there were no takers, and Michaelis had no option but to buy the journal himself. It was at this precarious juncture, which could so easily have spelt the end, that his club, the Savile, in Brook Street, Mayfair (Michaelis 2001, 403) came to the rescue. He was overheard bemoaning his plight by a fellow ‘Savilian’, Erasmus Darwin, Treasurer at the time of the then Institute of Metals (and coincidentally a direct descendant of Charles) (Michaelis 2001, 449), and so began this journal's long and somewhat unlikely association with what has since become the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, or IOM3, as it is generally known. (The Savile had by this time become for Michaelis a much-loved home from home, and around the time I took over as Editor, in January 2002, he was still sufficiently in evidence to take me to lunch there to mark the occasion.)

Old journalistic habits die hard, and along with the journal, I remember being told by a longstanding member of its editorial staff that Michaelis came to the Institute expecting an expense account. Certainly, on the account given in The Scientific Temper, his travels on ISR business differed little in scope from his travels while employed at the Telegraph. This was another respect in which Michaelis's ISR was no conventional scholarly journal, and when I first became involved, in 1996, along with review copies of new books across the sciences and beyond from many of the major academic publishers, the mailbag (and the in-tray was then still largely physical) remained replete with invitations to a wide range of press visits, conferences and receptions. I recall, for example, a press tour of the upper reaches of the old British Library buildings in the centre of the British Museum, just after the removal of the library itself to the Euston Road, and before the clearance of an accretion of portakabins to make way for the Great Court. Like Michaelis, I also became a regular at the annual ‘festivals of science’ of what was then known as the British Association for the Advancement of Science (now the British Science Association), for both of us always a rich source of possible contributors. Unlike Michaelis, my budget did not stretch to attendance at the American and German variants, or the annual Lindau meetings of Nobel laureates, all regular features of his diary (Michaelis 2001, 338).

In 1996, at the age of 80, and after 20 years at the reins of ISR, Michaelis retired a second time and moved back to Germany. His preferred succession plan would have involved a double act of his long-term US friends and associates, the husband and wife team of Joe and Vary Coates, he a pioneering futurologist and consultant and longstanding member of ISR's editorial board, she a specialist in technology assessment (Michaelis 2001, 487). However, by securing the journal's future with what was by then the Institute of Materials, the founding Editor had lost his once total control. Instead of the Coates duo, the Institute appointed as the journal's second Editor Professor John Edwin (‘Jack’) Harris, a long-term Fellow (originally of the Institution of Metallurgists, before the series of mergers which led eventually to today's IOM3), with something approaching celebrity status amongst its wider membership as author of the ‘Materials matters’ column in its monthly members’ magazine, Materials World.

A distinguished metallurgist and Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, Harris spent the bulk of his working life at the Central Electricity Generating Board's Berkeley Nuclear Laboratories in Gloucestershire, concerned with problems of fuel endurance in nuclear reactors and the physical processes behind them (Crossland 2010). Latterly, his interests had turned increasingly to policy issues, particularly around reprocessing and storage of spent nuclear fuel. This led to many years of involvement with the British branch of ‘Pugwash’, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an international network of scientists committed to a world free from nuclear weapons. He was a participant in a 1995 Pugwash conference in Hiroshima marking the 50th anniversary of the atomic bomb drop on that city, and in a 1998 study group on the future of Russia's atomic cities, and in 2001 declined (with considerable reluctance, on health grounds) the invitation to take over as Secretary General of International Pugwash.

Though board meetings in that era might no longer involve dinner at an Oxford or Cambridge college or London club (Michaelis 2001, 419), they still took place in a Nash drawing room overlooking the Mall, a few doors down Carlton House Terrace from the Royal Society. By that time, the editorial board had begun to diversify, slowly. Although still a majority of members had backgrounds in the natural sciences, some had developed parallel or subsequent careers beyond science, and others were engaged primarily in science communication or otherwise. So Richard L. Gregory FRS was a neuropsychologist specialising in visual perception and optical illusions, editor of the Oxford Companion to the Mind and with Sir Ernst Gombrich of Illusion in Nature and Art, and mainstay of the Royal Institution's schools programme; Roald Hoffmann, theoretical chemist, 1981 Nobel laureate for his work on reaction mechanisms, was also a TV host and published poet, and compere for fifteen years of the monthly ‘Entertaining Science’ cabaret in a Greenwich Village café; and Carl Djerassi, a pharmaceutical chemist best known for his role in the development of the contraceptive pill, became a novelist and widely translated playwright.

The breadth of Harris's interests extended well beyond science and technology. Research specialisms in metal creep and corrosion led to advisory roles on repairs to St Paul's and Gloucester cathedrals, and to the Albert Memorial and the British Museum roof (Crossland 2010). The former cheese loft in his Gloucestershire farmhouse he offered as studio accommodation to the artist Alan Lowndes, who became a close friend; through this association he got to know other artists including Terry Frost, luminary of the St Ives school. By 1986, when Physics Bulletin published ‘On losing manuscripts’, with a subtitle describing Harris as ‘a renowned after-dinner speaker’, his solid physical science background had become, as the byline put it, ‘heavily disguised’ (Harris 1986). By the time he took over as Editor of this journal, it had become very heavily disguised indeed, and he had turned himself into a polished and fluent essayist, writing knowledgeably on pretty much anything, with a trademark wry humour. Reflecting his range of wider interests and connections were the addition to this journal's editorial board in the later 1990s of Sir Joseph Rotblat, joint 1995 Nobel Peace Prize-winner with the Pugwash organisation; Sir Martin (subsequently Lord) Rees, Astronomer Royal and widely published commentator on science; John Ziman, theoretical physicist turned maverick voice in social studies of science (see in this journal e.g., Ziman 1998), also an inveterate reviewer of books for ISR at a time when book reviews remained a regular feature; and Wendy Barnaby, veteran science journalist, lecturer in science communication, onetime chair of the Association of British Science Writers.

What Jack Harris might have thought about interdisciplinarity he never opined, in the pages of this journal, or in discussion or conversation over the years I knew him. Inherently interdisciplinary in the breadth of his interests, and in the connections he made between them, he never gave the impression of having given the nature of interdisciplinarity much serious thought at all. Although compared to Michaelis he was Editor for a much shorter period, his published word count was considerable, his contributions (editorials mostly, plus some book reviews and other pieces) being far more discursive, occasions on the whole to write at much greater length about subjects which interested him than he got the opportunity to do in Materials World. However, in five years of editorials there is not a single engagement with the aims or focus of the journal. For him, interdisciplinarity was not an object of critical attention, even in the relatively limited way it was for Michaelis. It was, nonetheless, a recognised good, to the extent that I remember him telling me that he would have happily dropped the ‘science’ from this journal's title altogether, had the publishers been willing to countenance the move.

In 2003, the CNRS project ‘Society of Information’ launched an online seminar on ‘Rethinking interdisciplinarity’, the impetus for which was a ‘state of affairs, which allows disciplinary business to go on as usual at the cheap price of some interdisciplinary rhetoric’ (Sperber 2003), something which was very widely commented, at a time when ‘interdisciplinary’ had become an essential buzzword for research grant applications across the piece. The seminar included a contribution by Ian Hacking titled ‘The complacent disciplinarian’. Many would see Hacking (whose work has since featured in this journal; see Hacking 2005) as an interdisciplinarian par excellence: as he admits himself, he has ‘dabbled in, and sometimes contributed to, more fields of thought than most people can shake a stick at’; ‘interdisciplinary studies have’ simply ‘never been a problem’ for him. But his argument is that he remains, fundamentally, a ‘disciplinarian’, an analytic philosopher, driven by curiosity to ‘apply [his] discipline in different directions’ (Sperber 2003). Harris, similarly, remained fundamentally a disciplinarian, in his case a metallurgist, but again one curious about everything, applying his discipline to make connections in whatever direction took his fancy; just as Michaelis, with his decades of experience in the communication of science generally, had remained discernibly a chemist, even in the understanding of interdisciplinarity set out in his opening editorial.

By the time he published The Scientific Temper, Michaelis felt able to be graciously warm about the Harris regime (Michaelis 2001, 311); however, even then, five years after the fact, his feelings about the failure of his own succession plan are obvious, and his approval not entirely unreserved: ‘I can now state that [Harris] was a good choice which justified his selection, although I would have preferred the Coates team’ (Michaelis 2001, 487). The two men were unalike in character and temperament, and their motivations were also quite different. Scientifically, Harris's credentials were of a higher order than Michaelis's, but he was more interested in writing than editing, particularly in the literary form of the essay in which he had come to excel; Michaelis wrote, of course, but as a journalist, and was not much concerned with the craft of writing as such, hence the slightly ungainly patchwork form of his memoirs, which creatively avoided in a book of 500-plus pages the need for him to write at any extended length. In terms of the nature and range of this journal's published content, however, it would be difficult to point to any obvious shift resulting from the transition, beyond a significant increase in the length of editorials, and two weighty nuclear-themed issues, on ‘Nuclear power in the twenty-first century’ and radioactive waste management. If the Institute had hoped that Harris would boost ISR's materials science content, and thereby the journal's appeal amongst its membership, that hope went very much unfulfilled. ⁵

If Anthony Michaelis was a chemist and scientific correspondent, and Jack Harris an essayist and metallurgist, I came to ISR as a professional editor and (if anything) generalist. My association with the journal began in autumn 1996, when Jack Harris was starting out as Editor, I was new on the Institute's editorial staff, and Michaelis was still very much a driving force, doing his best to stay in touch, with frequent visits to the editorial office. The journal at that time remained recognisably Michaelis's creation. For some while into Harris' tenure, a good number of the papers published had had their genesis with Michaelis. Perhaps as important, ISR's physical look and feel, then still of far more significance to most readers than would be the case today, went unchanged throughout his time in charge. One of the earliest papers I remember being assigned to copy-edit was a typically iconoclastic piece about science policy and superstition by Steve Fuller (Fuller 1997), then a sociology professor at the University of Durham, who joined the editorial board under my successor and whose commitment to this journal has been of particular significance in more recent times, representing along with me the only continuity into the present from my successor's era. Another contribution early on in my time was by David Knight (Knight 1998), historian of chemistry and of relations between science and religion, authority on Humphry Davy (including his poetry), and though never on the editorial board, a staunch supporter and frequent contributor throughout my time as Editor. The title of Knight's paper, ‘Working in the glare of two cultures’, signals a theme never long absent from ISR's pages, including in a more recent special issue under the rubric ‘Some significances of the two cultures debate’ (James 2016) edited by Frank A.J.L. James, for many years the resident historian of science at the Royal Institution, leading international authority on Michael Faraday, and editorial board member from the start of my time for over 20 years.

By autumn 1998, I had been made Associate Editor, responsible for what remained a significant book review section, and increasingly active in commissioning more generally. The large proportion of actively solicited contributions has been a fact of life since the very beginning of the journal (Michaelis 2001, 339), reflecting what has always been a paucity of unsolicited submissions of sufficient quality even to be considered for serious review, many authors intuiting a match – as my successor, Willard McCarty, was fond of observing (see e.g., McCarty 2016, 4 or McCarty 2024, 458) – between ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘anything goes’. What this has meant in practice has been a consistently high expenditure of editorial time on commissioning, the upside being the satisfaction of being able to shape issues to an extent unusual for a scientific journal, the downside being the completely unrelenting nature of the task, even for a journal published quarterly. For myself and Michaelis, it was a definite case of the ‘pleasures outweigh[ing] the slog’ (Rose 2025); for Harris, I was never so sure; as for my successor, he sidestepped the drudgery by delegating entire issues as far as possible to guest editors.

Like Michaelis, I had what was that once widely acknowledged advantage known as a classical education. Like Michaelis, by university I had ended up in science, the engineering sciences in my case. Unlike Michaelis, my interest in matters beyond science never felt secondary or subsidiary. The academic discipline for which I felt most affinity during my time as Editor, most exemplifying the open generosity of scholarship which has always seemed to me to be one of the fundamentals at the heart of ISR, was history of science, in the ‘bridging’ mode described autobiographically by David Knight in the 2016 ‘two cultures’ themed issue, of an inherently interdisciplinary subject able to ‘span [C.P.] Snow's gulf and restore a common culture’ (Knight 2016, 260). Returning to the ‘generalist’ tag which I applied to myself above, this is history of science with a generalising vision, as a scholarly undertaking in which it is still possible for ‘specialized work’ to be ‘informed by general themes that other specialists could share’ (Kohler 2005, 224), ‘pertinent and concisely intelligible’ to a broad audience (Shapin 2005, 243). Extrapolating out into the full range of subject matter in principle within the purview of this journal, it was to such a ‘generalist’ ideal of scholarship that I aspired as Editor.

In my own time as Editor, and to only a slightly lesser extent as Associate Editor, I had essentially total control over the publication cycle, from planning, research and commissioning, through review and revision, to copy-editing, proofing and issue pagination; I even compiled the annual index, at a time when such a feature still seemed necessary. Overall, this allowed for a highly dynamic and responsive connection with authors, and for a considerable degree of tailoring and personalisation in the input and service I was able to provide. To return to this essay's title, this unusually high degree of editorial control is something that has made the journal very much ‘a personal creation’ (James 1985). This very personal nature of the enterprise had clearly been the case for Michaelis too, and was also so (although with no direct involvement with production) under Harris and McCarty; a ‘concentration of autonomy in one intellect, one sensibility’ perhaps more characteristic of a literary magazine (Rose 2025) than a scientific journal, which may go some way to explaining how ISR has survived so long without a more definite focus. Another respect in which ISR may be more akin to a literary magazine than a scientific journal is in having Editors who have on aggregate been very much ‘stayers’ (Rose 2025), the first four between us having sustained the ambition of Anthony Michaelis's interdisciplinary project for the first 49 years of its existence.

The idea of ISR as a journal of science in this ‘literary’ mould is not something I have previously made explicit, but it became a guiding principle in my time as Editor to attend equally to quality of writing and editing as to standard of intellectual content. In principle, the fact that my role embraced all aspects of production meant that this was straightforwardly achieved. In practice, the most creative interdisciplinary scholarship does not necessarily come packaged in the most engaging prose, and I frequently faced the reality (familiar, I suspect, to all editors) of adequately interesting work expressed in adequately interesting text, without the time or compelling motivation to do very much to ameliorate either. A second sense in which I felt the journal could offer a more ‘literary’ take on the sciences was in extending its interdisciplinary reach out more intentionally into the humanities, a project implicit in a number of Jack Harris's editorial essays, e.g., ‘A piece of chalk’ (Harris 1998), ‘Art and the electric light’ (Harris 1999) and ‘Bernal's Picasso’ (Harris 2000), and which Willard McCarty later pursued with vigour.

This interdisciplinary ‘linking [of] the sciences with the arts and the humanities’ (Michaelis 2001, 346) had been inherent in Michaelis's vision for the journal from the start, even if as McCarty notes in his final editorial (McCarty 2024), it came last on his list of editorial goals. Early published attempts to bridge the arts and sciences tended to take for granted that there was indeed a clear divide between these ‘two cultures’ that needed bridging. Though superficially interdisciplinary, these were very largely forays outwards from science (in Michaelis's restricted sense), for example ‘The aesthetics of engineering’ (Black 1976), ‘The artist and space’ (Dean 1978) or ‘The sea: its science and poetry’ (Tont 1981). Such approaches reflected the rather utilitarian push to increase ‘public understanding of science’ which gained currency through the 1980s (see e.g., Royal Society 1985), one of whose central aims was to equip scientists to present themselves and their research more palatably to ‘the public’, in the conviction that these efforts would pay dividends of social and economic prosperity into the future. This was something very much in tune with Michaelis's aims for ISR, and with his own life in science communication, even if he never overtly aligned himself with that broader project. Of more interest as early expressions of interdisciplinary intent between the arts and sciences were papers such as ‘H.G. Wells’ contribution to Western thought’ (Haynes 1982) and ‘Colour and its history’ (Gage 1984); however, these were the exception, and contributions reflecting a genuinely deep level of scholarly engagement between scientific and humanistic disciplines did not feature significantly until much later.

My first meaningful venture in this direction was my third issue as Editor, on the theme of ‘science and theatre’ (Cattermole 2002). Themed issues had been an occasional feature in both Michaelis's and Harris's time, and McCarty resorted to them increasingly; but editorial control in almost all those cases was passed to a guest editor. Mostly, I used themed issues not as a way of delegating the slog, but to give my commissioning a focus, in areas I felt deserved more considered attention, and where this journal as a forum provided the opportunity to offer a distinctive slant; and, in some cases, to highlight a neglected or emerging area, between or beyond the scope of established disciplines. At a time when Michael Frayn's Copenhagen was generating excitement in scholarly as well as critical circles, what turned out to be the first issue of any journal devoted to science and theatre ticked all the boxes, including as an expression of the literary, in both senses outlined above. Contributions ranged across theatre and literary studies, history of science and archaeology, with practitioners as well as academics amongst the authors. Of particular significance were the first outings in this journal of Philip Ball, polymathic science writer, editor and commentator, and Frank James, both of whom went on to add to the list of long-serving and loyally supportive members of the editorial board. The issue also brought ISR to the attention of Kirsten E. Shepherd, who became a regular voice on science and theatre from a theatre studies perspective, including as guest co-editor of two further special issues in Willard McCarty's time (Shepherd-Barr and Bartleet 2013, 2014); eventually, in September 2012, she also joined the editorial board, but only after the retirement of Carl Djerassi, whose very particular take on science and theatre was fundamentally at odds with her own (see Shepherd-Barr 2002).

Some of my other key supporters in this more considered rapprochement with the humanities were art historian Martin Kemp (editorial board member from 2007), anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (board member from 2006), chemist, poet and by then very longstanding editorial board member Roald Hoffmann, journalist and art historian Ursula Seibold-Bultmann (board member from 2003, also daughter of an earlier board member, oceanographer Eugen Seibold), as well as poet Mario Petrucci. Other themed issues followed on ‘The literature of science’ (September 2003), with contributions on Victorian literature, science fiction, David Lodge, Michel Serres, cultural studies of science and epistemology, amongst others; ‘Illustrating science’ (September 2004), co-edited with Seibold-Bultmann, interrogating in interdisciplinary and historical perspective the synergistic relationship between scientific illustrations and scientific texts; ‘Science and poetry’ (December 2005), with essays on William Empson, Humphry Davy, Hans Christian Andersen, contributors including poets Maurice Riordan, Mario Petrucci, Alice Fulton and Deryn Rees-Jones, and a number of poems reproduced, in German as well as English; and ‘The sound of science’ (December 2006), featuring papers on Isaac Newton and the major sixth, music and precision measurement in nineteenth-century Prussia, industrial noise and the cultural meaning of sound, digital audio, and sonification in the social sciences.

Another of my goals as Editor was driven by more existential concerns. In establishing ISR following his exit from the Telegraph, Anthony Michaelis found a means of maintaining a career's worth of scientific connections, perhaps the best means at his disposal for doing so. However, despite the fanfares surrounding the journal's launch and the exceptional distinction and commitment of his editorial board, even Michaelis's optimistic self-confidence and dogged persistence in promoting his creation had never quite been sufficient. I have on occasion thought of my own time as Editor, and before that as Jack Harris's Associate, as having something in common with Mario Biagioli's account of the efforts of Henry Oldenburg, first Secretary of the Royal Society of London, in sustaining the Society beyond its early years. Michaelis might have acquired, ten years on, a list of impressive-sounding international institutional subscribers (Michaelis 2001, 347) (again, one suspects, largely through force of his own personality). The reality was that ‘[d]espite the enthusiasm that permeated the first few years […], crisis was just below the surface’, and ISR's ‘corporate survival [was] never certain’, as reflected in the multiple early changes in publisher, culminating in Arrowsmith's public auction; the journal's ‘high visibility abroad’ was an effective mask for what amounted to generally ‘poor performance at home’ (Biagioli 2006, 46, 48).

Biagioli's particular interest is in the role of distance in the construction of the ‘aura’ of scientific authority, an ‘investment process’ in which ‘credit [is lent] to a practitioner as a result both of the things one might know and of the things one might not know about that person’. To be effectively developed and sustained, the aura thus depends on the partial nature of information available due to the distance ‘between those who are working at producing knowledge claims and those who may or may not decide to take the risk of investing in such claims’ (Biagioli 2006, 21–22). As a self-employed professional editor with no academic standing independent of my involvement with ISR, my success as Editor in maintaining the aura so carefully established by Anthony Michaelis was in part dependent on keeping not known these facts of my own situation. What also was best kept not known was the journal's own relative lack of resources and, for example, its quite limited circulation. So long as this partial state of knowledge about ISR prevailed, the mere fact of its ‘survival (and the projection of that survival as success)’ (Biagioli 2006, 49) meant that it could remain a prestige project with which authors might choose to be associated.

By the time Michaelis retired from ISR in 1996, the world of scholarly publishing was in a state of flux, and the days of the small-scale, in-house editorial departments which had previously been commonplace in learned societies and professional institutions were numbered. By the time I took over as Editor in 2002, somewhat unexpectedly, on Jack Harris's early exit from the role, it seemed clear to me that for the journal's corporate survival to be less uncertain, my own successor would need to have an established academic profile. It would no longer do for ISR's long-term future to depend on Biagioli's uneasy compact, which the rise of impact factors was in any case making it increasingly difficult to sustain. As my eventual successor has himself recently reflected, ISR had maintained up to that point a level of personal investment from the publisher's side which was ‘of a different era’; an era I know from my own direct experience was indeed ‘in many respects more humane’ (McCarty 2024).

Willard McCarty's first engagement with ISR was a paper published at the end of Jack Harris's editorship on the ‘interdiscipline’ of humanities computing (McCarty 2001), the field whose intellectual foundations he has done so much to secure (McCarty 2005a). Immediately after, at the start of 2002, he was my first recruit to the editorial board. In June 2005, midway through my time as Editor, he was cementing his relationship with the journal, and contributing to my push towards the humanities, with a guest-edited issue entitled ‘Digital scholarship, digital culture’ (McCarty 2005b). McCarty's own term as Editor-in-Chief began in the summer of 2008, and extended to the end of 2024, a period in the life of the journal whose highlights are surveyed in his valedictory editorial (McCarty 2024). Arguably, his landmark achievement during those years was a new form of special issue of great intellectual richness, consisting of an opening contribution from a prominent scholar (Geoffrey Lloyd, Tim Ingold, Alan Wilson among them), along with essay-length responses from invited colleagues. As an aside, it is worth noting that this form of special issue involved another non-standard refereeing system (see note 4), in which authors and reviewers were aware of each others’ identities, ‘open rather than secretive reviewing … based on respect and trust’ (McCarty 2024, 456).

As soon as he had become seriously involved with ISR, I remember McCarty encouraging me to be more explicit about the journal's aims. This is something about which I have always felt hesitation. In certain practical respects, a more closely defined focus would have been welcome, in helping to circumvent the ‘anything goes’ problem of unsolicited submissions referred to above. However, if this journal is about going ‘beyond’ discipline, by moving into border areas between established disciplines and gaps left unexamined by more conventional approaches, my concern was that something essential would be lost in the attempt to fix its scope too clearly, risking making interdisciplinarity itself into a constraint. Instead, I preferred to let ISR's content speak for itself; in practice, through the first half of his time as Editor-in-Chief, McCarty preferred to do the same, and it was not until 10 years ago, on the occasion of the journal's fortieth anniversary, that he set out at any length his understanding of ISR's ‘intellectual project’ (McCarty 2016). In stating my own commitment to the journal as Editor, I can do no better than quote here from that editorial:

I take the word [interdisciplinarity] to name a vigorous field of activity in urgent need of critical study. ISR has from time to time published articles on the subject … But … interdisciplinarity itself is not ISR's focus, at least not directly. Since the beginning … ISR's purpose has not been to say what interdisciplinarity is but to exhibit what happens when a researcher starts from a discipline of origin and expands into others … ISR refrains from identifying wholly with … conversations on interdisciplinarity … because … such discussion tends to reify a process of becoming … and so to conceal the struggle which ISR exists to explore. (McCarty 2016, 2–3)

Times have changed, and a less covert, more direct advance on the nature of interdisciplinarity is now warranted. This shift in focus for ISR reflects a wider contextual shift in the history of interdisciplinarity itself, and in its evolving status as an object of critical attention, which is explored in depth elsewhere in this anniversary issue. At the start of this new chapter in the life of Anthony Michaelis's creation, I am enormously grateful to the latest in line of his successors, Mattia Gallotti, for his interest in ISR's editorial lineage and history, and for inviting me to contribute in this vein. It is beyond doubt that Michaelis would have wanted to join me in wishing him as much enjoyment, fulfilment and satisfaction as the rest of us have gained through our association with ISR, as he steers it into the second half of its first century.