Profile of Randy Schekman: Reflections on his first year as PNAS Editor-in-Chief

Abstract

While the pace, tools, and culture of science have evolved over Randy Schekman's distinguished career, he has continued to hold on to some core principles of research. Inspired in part by his mentor, Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg, Schekman takes a “reductionist” slant to science—identifying, separating, and purifying the individual components of a system so that each can be intently studied until its nuances are understood. Schekman also believes that although new technologies certainly have their place, classical techniques, such as biochemical assays, remain powerful approaches to tackling fundamental questions. As editor-in-chief, Schekman holds these same values in his vision for PNAS. Randy Schekman Although he expresses a desire to continue to expand and modernize the journal by bolstering online content and fine-tuning the rules governing member submissions, his main goal is to turn back the clock. “This journal was considered one of the best back in the 1960s and 70s,” he says. “When I was in Kornberg's lab, we were all dying to have our papers in the Proceedings ; anything less was almost an embarrassment. Today, things have changed, and other journals have risen to prominence, and we need to make scientists ‘want’ to put their best stuff in our journal again.” As proof, Schekman recalls that his first PNAS paper from Kornberg's lab was just the type of major discovery that people wanted to publish in PNAS (1). Schekman took the reins of PNAS in November 2006, following in the footsteps of Nicholas R. Cozzarelli just as he had many times before. Schekman acknowledges that his own path closely mirrored Cozzarelli's: studying under Arthur Kornberg; becoming a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA); and assuming the chair of the National Academy's biochemistry section. Just as Cozzarelli was able to …