Sir

In April 1974, some months after I had taken over from John Maddox as editor of Nature, I was driving home from the printers with a colleague at four in the morning, having just put the latest issue to bed. News came in over the radio of a coup in Portugal. What would John have done? We agreed that he would have turned the car round and written a new thousand-word Editorial: 'What future for Portuguese science? The coup in Lisbon is, or ought to be, an opportunity for Portuguese scientists ...' We smiled at the thought, but drove on.

This little story exemplifies John's approach to Nature. As a one-time journalist, he prized immediacy. He had a formidable list of contacts, and even if he hadn't known any Portuguese scientists, he would still have created a sense of authority.

Until his arrival as editor in 1966, Nature had been a worthy journal of record but lacking in flair; it changed rapidly as John brought his journalistic background to bear. 'We wuz robbed' was the title of an Editorial written at the time of the 1966 Football World Cup, proposing a new method for determining the winner. Very different from previous fare, which ran along the lines of 'comment on the progress of Her Majesty's Alkali Inspectorate as described in its 47th Annual Report'.

John gathered around him enthusiasts in the academic world for this new style of journal. He urged us to seek out good scientific papers and gave us free rein to hold forth in Editorials. We were awed by his restless energy in generating thousands of words.

John was immensely active. He took on broader responsibilities within Macmillan; he launched the weekly Nature New Biology and Nature Physical Science; he spoke regularly on the radio; he challenged environmentalists' excesses and wrote a book, Doomsday Syndrome (Macmillan, 1972). That year, he founded Maddox Editorial Ltd, which went on to publish a European journal. The result of all this was that Nature received less than his full-time attention and began to fray at the edges. In 1973, Macmillan and John parted company.

Shortly before I took over, John expounded his 'diminishing tenure' rule to me by drawing a little graph of duration of successive Nature editorships. Norman Lockyer, the first, served for a remarkable 50 years, but the stints of his successors — Richard Gregory, joint editors Jack Brimble and Arthur Gale, and John himself — became steadily shorter. In his impish way, John, who had been editor for seven years, predicted I'd last three-and-a-half.

Fortunately I managed rather longer, but when John, by then director of the Nuffield Foundation, got wind of my interest in moving on, he invited me to lunch and revealed that he very much wanted to get back into the editor's chair. Out came the imp in him again: 'Why don't we swap jobs?'

He returned in 1980; at that time, many doubted his wisdom in going back. He proved us wrong over the next 15 years and spectacularly disproved the 'diminishing tenure' rule.