Some 100,000 scientific and technical journals are published around the world, so one might wonder what would make someone decide to publish number 100,001.

Dr. Julio Licinio, the editor of a new biomedical journal, says he started Molecular Psychiatry because an appropriate journal for papers on the topic didn't already exist. Molecular psychiatry "news" is fast-breaking and the general scientific journals, which publish only a few articles each year about any one topic, could not accommodate all of it. Each specialty journal publishes papers in a defined medical or scientific area and might not catch the attention of all the people who study and are concerned with themes in molecular psychiatry. So, in March of 1996, the first issue of Molecular Psychiatry hit the neurobiology newstands, less than a year after the idea first took shape in Licinio's head.

Licinio's entry into the world of publishing is a natural outgrowth of his lifelong interest in learning and communication.

"I was always an avid reader," he says. "I got each childhood disease right before a vaccine went on the market, so I always got it bad and frequently missed school. My older sister had many books at home about teaching, and during that time I read them all."

One book whose message stuck in his mind explained strategies for effective systematic teaching, the field called didactics. Instruction and communication, it said, are only effective if the concept that is in your head ends up in another person's head in just the form that you want it to. The book argued that responsibility for getting that information properly into the other person's head rested with the one who was presenting the information.

Licinio says it is that directive that is foremost in his mind as he puts together issues of Molecular Psychiatry. The journal must present material in ways that will be crystal clear to its readers.

The field of molecular psychiatry is young and fast-growing. It couples two areas that were once quite separate -- clinical psychiatry and molecular medicine.

Researchers have gotten in positions, within the past few years, to analyze and understand the complicated relations and interactions of simple molecules in the body with each other and the effects the molecules have on human behavior -- both normal and aberrant. "We define molecular psychiatry broadly," wrote Licinio in the July 1996 issue, "as a new interdisciplinary field focused on the elucidation of the fundamental biological mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders and their treatment."

Licinio credits several recent scientific and technologic developments and advances for the birth of the new field. Researchers now have access to enormous amounts of data about genes, genetic markers, and inheritance patterns, thanks to the human genome project. They can isolate and clone genes relatively easily. They can study how the genes and the products they produce work and how the diseases and traits that are associated with these genes come to be. Some of these diseases affect the mind.

In addition, scientists have devised new methods for targeting where in the brain discrete actions are coordinated and thoughts are thought. The techniques run the gamut -- from functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example, which provides "real time" pictures of activated regions of the brain at the exact moments that the brain is engaged in specific activities, to post mortem studies that track where information-containing molecules, like messenger RNAs, are concentrated in brain tissues.

Finally, numerous new experimental systems -- such as "knockout mice" that lack single genes and "transgenic mice" that carry one or more new genes -- permit researchers to evaluate gene activities by their presence or by their absence.

When Licinio proposed developing a molecular psychiatry journal, the response he received from the publisher was "what an exciting idea!" Then came the challenge that all new journals face at startup -- how to get good papers for the first issue in order to set a high standard for the journal. Many scientist-authors understandably are reluctant to take a chance on an untried publication, one with no track record on quality. But through personal contacts and intensive advertising in Nature magazine, Licinio and the journal's staff put together a first issue that included opinion and news pieces, reports of original research, guest editorials, and a seminar section by scientists and doctors from many of the best universities, public and private institutions, and companies around the world.

Many medical journals have formal affiliations with professional medical societies; they typically publish abstracts from annual meetings and sponsor portions of a meeting or all of it. Molecular Psychiatry will do this for a section of the Biomedicine meeting, a meeting that is held each spring in Washington D.C. and brings together members of the Association of American Physicians, the American Federation for Medical Research, and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. Licinio says that speakers at the Biomedicine meetings have regularly addressed medicine from the neck down but have stayed away from psychiatry and neurobiology. Biomedicine '97 will be different, because Molecular Psychiatry will sponsor a panel and a poster session addressing issues in molecular psychiatry and neuroscience; after the meeting, Molecular Psychiatry will publish selected abstracts.

Licinio is hoping that Molecular Psychiatry will appeal to researchers worldwide and also to nonscientist readers. To address the needs of the first audience, the journal is considering publishing summaries of all articles in five languages -- English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. To meet the needs of nonscientists, Licinio has asked authors to limit their use of jargon. But jargon has its place. It helps scientists communicate with precision, and it is crucial for proper indexing. Without key technical words in the abstracts and titles of articles, interested persons could not retrieve relevant publications from the vast medical literature. Licinio continues to explore approaches to balancing the use of language that researchers respect and rely on with efforts to make discoveries accessible to nonspecialists and nonscientists.

Licinio now spends a small amount of his time working on the journal. Most of his time is taken up with clinical research on depression and related diseases and with laboratory research. He is especially interested in the molecules of the nervous system and the immune system that interact in depression and their roles in the progression of disease.

"I love the journal work," says Licinio, "and do it with great pleasure. I'm in contact with lots of people, and it is very rewarding to see what I do get out so fast and reach so many people. I love research for the same reasons that I love producing the journal. Both give me opportunities to convey important information to people and to have an impact on the community."