Changin’ with the times

Bruce Brandfon got his start selling advertising for Combustion Magazine, a publication read by power plant engineers.
Photo by Leslye Smith.

At first glance, the transformation from the saxophonist-turned-bass-player of a band called the Slithy Toves (thanks to Lewis Carroll) into the publisher of Scientific American magazine might seem unlikely at best. But after talking with Bruce Brandfon (English ’69) about how it happened, it seems not just inevitable but logical. “We were the only non-soul band really to be popular” on the University Grounds, he explains of his days in the Slithy Toves at U.Va. in the mid-1960s. Instead, they were forward-thinking enough to play psychedelic music — an innovation that had yet to take hold on Grounds. It’s this same attitude that has allowed Brandfon to help reposition Scientific American, the oldest continually published monthly magazine in the country (it just celebrated its 162nd anniversary this past summer), at the forefront of change.

When Brandfon arrived at Scientific American from his job as advertising director of Newsweek in 2001, he says, the magazine “had not been very well managed as a business for some time. Why? Because science is hard and advertising clients had shied away from it.” But Brandfon recognized that “The issues that the 21st century is defined on are issues that the science community has the answers to … urgent issues like the climate or curing global diseases like diabetes or malnutrition or how to irrigate the third world.”

Where public policy makers once used to set the agenda for the scientific community (think of the space program or the development of the polio vaccine), the equation has now been reversed, and Brandfon sees an important role in it for his magazine. “It used to be that the science community was like the smart kid in the back of the class who knew all the answers but never raised his or her hand,” he says of the old relationship between researchers and government. There was “a sense that ‘I don’t have to be outspoken about this kind of thing because when you’ve run a fever for a few days, you go see the doctor.’” But as public policy makers have become less inclined to ask the right questions of the scientific community or to turn to them for help, the staff of Scientific American, according to Brandfon, “feel[s] it is our responsibility to make our audience aware of the responsibility that they bear in these areas.”

Certainly they have the reputation and the reach. Scientific American is now published in 19 languages, most recently adding Turkish, Chinese and Hungarian editions, and has also just launched a new title called Scientific American Mind, which covers mental health and neuroscience. “There is such reverence for this magazine,” Brandfon says with awe, adding hastily that he knows it doesn’t have much to do with him personally. “We presented Al Gore our Policy Leader of the Year award and Gore said how honored he was to receive the award from us, referring to Scientific American as a national treasure because it takes these extremely complicated and urgent issues and writes about them in a language that we can all understand and therefore become well informed about.”

He pauses for a moment, then speaks with a combination of obvious pride and perhaps just the slightest hint of that irreverent bass player who once thrilled his fellow undergrads with his edgy style. “I can’t imagine anyone saying that Vanity Fair is a national treasure.”