This essay is to describe my experience with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences up until 1970. Mathematicians and other scientists who were National Academy of Science (NAS) members encouraged younger colleagues by communicating their research announcements to the Proceedings . For example, I can perhaps cite my own experiences. S. Eilenberg and I benefited as follows (communicated, I think, by M. H. Stone): “Natural isomorphisms in group theory” (1942) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 28, 537–543; and “Relations between homology and homotopy groups” (1943) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 29, 155–158. The second of these papers was the first introduction of a geometrical object topologists now call an “Eilenberg–Mac Lane Space.” This idea was immediately accepted by leading topologists, with later detailed presentation by the authors in specialized journals. The Proceedings presentation of this idea helped Eilenberg and me by its promptness. The first of these papers is a more striking case; it introduced the very abstract idea of a “category”—a subject then called “general abstract nonsense”! When Eilenberg and I submitted a full presentation in 1945 (to the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society ), we feared that the editor would turn it down as too “far out,” not really mathematics. So Eilenberg, who knew the editor well, persuaded him to choose as referee a young mathematician—one whom we could influence because he was then a junior member of the Applied Mathematics Group at Columbia University (war research), where Eilenberg and I were then also members, and I was Director. Happily the full paper was accepted, but the subject itself was well off beat and not generally recognized, and it was ignored till 1958, when a student of Eilenberg’s made an important breakthrough. So in this case publication in the Proceedings was …