Working for John Maddox

Soon after I joined Nature as an assistant editor working for the biology team — responsible for picking biology papers for publication, as well as commissioning relevant reviews and advising the News and Views team and other editors on biology matters — I heard that the journal was planning to publish a special issue devoted to the latest developments in neuroscience. One would naturally imagine close involvement of the biology editors, particularly those with special responsibility for neuroscience; indeed, those editors were ready and waiting to offer their services. But no call came; no specific request was made by the man in charge, John Maddox, recently returned to start his second stint as editor. Then, not more than a week or two before the issue was due to come out, we heard of John’s plan: he flew to the US for a whirlwind tour interviewing prominent neuroscientists, and then returned and wrote the entire special issue himself, 20 pages of the journal, on a subject distant from his background as a theoretical chemist turned physicist. Of course, he got away with it. I recall no complaints from neuroscientists, no-one wrote in pointing out errors of detail or general approach. This incident is characteristic of the man: he had an absolute conviction, not only that he could understand any area of science, but that he could write at length about any subject for readers who are expert in the field, as well as those reading for more general interest. And so long as there was a hard deadline to work to, and time enough for the writing to be physically possible, all would be well. As the current editor of Nature, Phillip Campbell has written, John had an “all-consuming intellect”, and to his colleagues, he was an “irresistible, unstoppable force”. I think there are three important things to bear in mind in thinking about John: first, he was at heart a theoretical physicist, with typical conviction that, as someone who has tackled the hardest of sciences, no other could pose a problem; second, he had worked as a journalist, as science correspondent of The Manchester Guardian, and brought to Nature a strong journalistic approach; and third, despite his slightly plummy English accent, he was Welsh — convinced not only that he could call spirits from the vasty deep, but that when he did so, they would invariably come. John undoubtedly had a real, deep interest in all varieties of science, but there was a curious tension between this interest and his journalistic tendencies — he is said to have responded, when asked how he could write on such a wide range of topics, that it is “because I am not afraid of getting things wrong”. As someone else has said, he was “not intimidated by facts”. I think this tension reflects the slightly odd, hybrid aspect of Nature itself — in part a Editorial