Charles Sherr on Favorite Journals
  Charles Sherr     Biography    
Recorded: 15 Jun 2002

I mean the general interest journals in my field are the same as the general interest journals in any [field]—I mean you have—my career was really built with Cell papers, frankly. You know, if I gave you my C.V. and you asked where did I publish all my important papers. If we said, maybe in this whole collection there are a few papers that are important, where are they? They would all be in Cell. Science and Nature are equally important, I think. And now, of course, there are Nature journals and additional Cell journals, and we can ask ourselves, you know, what the dilution factor is and I’m not sure I know. Genes and Development has been very successful. I happen to think Molecular and Cellular Biology is a good journal. It has a lot of great stuff in there and it’s because it’s science written by scientists. I have a very positive feeling about the journal. I was a Managing Editor for five years so I had the experience of trying to get papers reviewed. It’s a very different activity for a working scientist. And then trying to adjudicate the papers at the end and communicate opinions to authors who would complain as usual. So I think that’s quite a good journal. We get EMBO journal. I don’t read very much—I don’t find that much in there. It’s fine, but I don’t know. They don’t publish as much for what I’m interested in. But it’s still quite okay. I don’t know who I left out. I get some specialty stuff. You know, I get a couple major journals. I get a few review journals; we get all kinds of stuff.

Charles Sherr earned his joint M.D./Ph.D. degree from New York University in 1973. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator based at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN. His work focuses on retroviral oncogenes, growth factors and their receptors, and cell cycle control. In 1991, Sherr's laboratory discovered the mammalian D-type G1 cyclins and went on to identify the cyclin-dependent kinases with which they associate, as well as a series of polypeptide inhibitors that negatively regulate their activities.

Sherr is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has won numerous awards and is the author of more than 235 scientific articles. He joined the National Cancer Institute in 1973, becoming a member of the NIH staff in 1975 and head of the viral pathology section, Division of Cancer Cause and Prevention, in 1977. In 1983, he relocated to St. Jude. Sherr is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.