A controversial firing in turbulent times
A prominent open-access science journal, eLife , has fired editor-in-chief Michael Eisen in the wake of a dispute over his social-media posts. On 23 October, Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote on the social-media platform X (formerly Twitter) : “I have been informed that I am being replaced as the Editor in Chief of @eLife for retweeting a @TheOnion piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians.” The article on the satirical website The Onion , posted on 13 October , was entitled: ‘Dying Gazans criticized for not using last words to condemn Hamas’. Eisen, who is Jewish, posted a link on X, accompanied by the word “Bingo”. A day after Eisen was fired, eLife ’s board of directors issued a statement indicating that he had been dismissed because of broader issues: “his approach to leadership, communication and social media has at key times been detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build and ...