Munich

Long ago, the residents of the Polish village of Chelm reputedly decided that the Moon was more important than the Sun, because it provided light when it was really needed — at night.

This outlook apparently rules the roost at the Chelm Institute in Orange County, California. Each year, the Journal of Biological Rhythms, a circadian-biology journal, publishes unusual letters from the institute's researchers in its April issue.

Last year, for example, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky wrote in from the institute complaining of the “sappy sermons you call editorials”, and giving readers advice on how to exploit the peer-review system to see off their competitors. In a previous year, the Chelm institute's more idealistic M. Pupique argued for a lottery system for selecting papers for publication or making academic appointments, to overthrow what he termed the “hegemony of the academic ruling class”.

But the journal's editor Martin Zatz, a circadian biologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, has now come clean and revealed that he writes the letters himself. They are April Fool's Day spoofs, intended to stimulate thoughts on important issues in science that Zatz considers worthy of a wider airing.

“I want to make the journal more interesting,” he explains, “and some of the issues that interest me relate more to the human-nature side of science — issues that are difficult to address in editorials.”

The letters attributed to Lobachevsky and Pupique allow Zatz to address concerns about the imperfections of peer review and proposed alternatives to it, Zatz says.

In this month's spoof, Quincy Adams Wagstaff, director of the Chelm Institute Omega Multi-Center Institute for Co-operative Research in the 21st Century, boasts of his alleged discovery of the “Mother of all Clock Genes”. Wagstaff's self-aggrandizing text praises the teamwork that led to the discovery — but it soon becomes apparent that the bombastic director has no intention of rewarding the rest of the team with either co-authorship or a share in a pending patent.

Some of the references in the spoof letters may pass many readers by. Not everyone, for example, will recall that Lobachevsky was a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician, whose name was appropriated by Tom Lehrer in a 1960s song about plagiarism, or that Wagstaff was an anarchic college president in the Marx brothers' film Horse Feathers. Zatz is bemused by such shortcomings. “Few understand irony any more,” he complains.