Hello and welcome back to Backchat, our roundtable discussion show where we take a peek behind the scenes of what goes on at nature.

This week marks 150 years since the first issue of nature was published on the 4th of November 1869, no less.

In this edition of Backchat, we'll be peering back through time at the history of nature

and gazing into the future at what the next 150 years might bring.

I'm Benjamin Thompson, and joining me on this time-traveling adventure are Magdalena Skipper.

Hi, I'm editor-in-chief of nature.

I coordinate the strategy for the journal and look after the many parts that actually make up nature

itself. Retoo Dan? Hi, I'm Retu Dan. I am the vice president of the nature journals. And Helen Pearson.

I'm Chief Magazine Editor for Nature. I oversee our journalism and opinion content. So a wealth of

experience then on my panel today. And well, let's talk about nature then. So a wealth of experience then on my panel today. And, well, let's talk about nature then.

So 150 years of publishing. A lot is the same. Nature is still publishing science. But an awful lot

has changed. Magdalena, if you had to distill down the differences, I mean, what would you say

are the three biggest changes that have happened

in nature over this century and a half? Well, first of the mark would be the fact that we were

actually launched to be something slightly different from what we are today. We were launched

to be much more like a magazine, let's say like Scientific American is today today where the scientists themselves were supposed to

write about their discoveries for the general public. Of course today that's an important part of

nature but that's not the whole of nature. We also publish original discoveries and thereby

an important purpose of nature is to communicate science within the scientific community.

So that's your first difference.

The second difference I'm going to say is in the authorship.

So some of the very early papers that we published, the very early communications,

...