Force of Nature: Tales of the Late Sir John Maddox



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By Kevin Davies

April 14, 2009 | COMMENTARY: Sir John Maddox, the editor emeritus of Nature, passed away on April 12, aged 83. During two stints as editor of Nature, the first from 1966-1973, the second from 1980-1995, Maddox restored the British journal’s reputation as perhaps the most prestigious science journal in the world.

Among many tributes, American science writer John Horgan called Maddox “hard-headed, scarily knowledgeable, hyper-articulate, unfailingly gracious even as he ripped you a new one.”

Born in Swansea, Wales, Maddox trained as a physicist but loved all flavors of science, sometimes to the point where it didn’t make perfect business sense. When Maddox resigned in 1973, Britain was paralyzed with the miner’s strike. Nature’s management abruptly scrapped his three-year experiment to publish three weekly issues — Nature, Nature Physical Sciences, and Nature New Biology.

During my brief stint in the magazine’s offices off Fleet Street in 1990, I caught fleeting glimpses of the man in action. One lunch time, he emerged from his smoke-filled corner office to introduce the staff to the Amazing James Randi. The brilliant American illusionist had accompanied Maddox to Paris to investigate the Benveniste homeopathy charade. I’d been wondering what Maddox was doing, traveling to France with a professional magician and a government bureaucrat to debunk a paper he had decided to publish. Randi proceeded to give us an impromptu magic show while we munched our sandwiches, instantly allaying any lingering doubts. 

Monday evenings, Maddox would settle in with a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes, and bash out the weekly editorial and the lead commentary. The subject matter could be anything from junk DNA to subatomic particles to nuclear disarmament. Occasionally he’d invite the staff to his Kensington townhouse for a party, but by the end of the evening, he’d be contentedly sitting in his dining room reading the newspaper, doubtless formulating his next editorial.

On one occasion in 1991, Maddox was perusing stacks of rejected manuscripts, pulling out papers where he might quibble with the editors’ decision. One rejected paper that perplexed him described the mapping of a gene for Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). “We are in the publishing business,” he chided the biology team, reminding us to keep in mind the importance of publishing papers of general interest. He called it “the David Niven Factor,” and not just because the British actor also died of ALS.

Maddox was supportive of plans to launch a Nature spin-off journal in 1992 in genetics, but characteristically he had strong views of how it should be run. Rather than be independent, he argued that Nature should simply hire a second genetics editor and review more papers. Management did not like that idea and Nature Genetics was created under independent editorial control. Well, almost… As we went to press with the inaugural issue, Maddox decided he should write the opening editorial himself. Maddox retired in 1995, and was knighted soon afterwards.

I last saw Maddox in Madrid in 2004, where he was a special guest at a cancer symposium hosted by the Spanish national cancer center (CNIO). He warmed to Iya Khalil, the co-founder of in silico company Gene Network Sciences, complementing her after her talk, saying that she had probably spoken twice as fast as any speaker he had ever heard -- while still being intelligible.

 

Maddox leaves a family of talented writers – his biographer wife Brenda, journalist daughter Bronwen (The Times), and novelist and Discover contributor son, Bruno – and many, many admiri

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