 ", a typical "ietsist" answer being "No, but there must be something", "something" being "iets" in Dutch.The atheist political columnist and molecular biologist Ronald Plasterk (who later served as the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science and Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations) published a piece in 1997 in the magazine "Intermediar" in which he used the word.The term became widely known in the Netherlands after Plasterk used it in a feature for the television programme "Buitenhof".