Goodbye John
2021; Springer Nature; Volume: 40; Issue: 14 Linguagem: Inglês
10.15252/embj.2021108887
ISSN1460-2075
Autores Tópico(s)Health, Environment, Cognitive Aging
ResumoObituary29 June 2021free access Goodbye John Frank Gannon Corresponding Author Frank Gannon [email protected] QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Herston, Qld, Australia Search for more papers by this author Iain Mattaj Corresponding Author Iain Mattaj [email protected] Human Technopole, Palazzo Italia, Milan, Italy Search for more papers by this author Frank Gannon Corresponding Author Frank Gannon [email protected] QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Herston, Qld, Australia Search for more papers by this author Iain Mattaj Corresponding Author Iain Mattaj [email protected] Human Technopole, Palazzo Italia, Milan, Italy Search for more papers by this author Author Information Frank Gannon *,1 and Iain Mattaj *,2 1QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Herston, Qld, Australia 2Human Technopole, Palazzo Italia, Milan, Italy **Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected] ***Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected] The EMBO Journal (2021)40:e108887https://doi.org/10.15252/embj.2021108887 PDFDownload PDF of article text and main figures. ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareFacebookTwitterLinked InMendeleyWechatReddit Figures & Info It is with great sadness when we learned of the death of John Tooze, our predecessor as the Director of EMBO and the founder and first Chief Editor of The EMBO Journal. Our thoughts are with his wife Sharon and his children, and we share our memories of John with the broader community who have known him as a scientific coordinator and an editor who embodied EMBO’s credo of excellence. John’s legacy at EMBO by Frank Gannon As an EMBO fellow and later member, I saw EMBO as the embodiment of all of the things that scientists appreciate: efficiency, rapidity in response, minimal bureaucracy, generosity and excellence as the only criterion on which decisions were made. So when someone suggested in 1993 that I should apply to replace John Tooze as Executive Secretary of EMBO, I imagined that EMBO would have␣a fine building and plenty of skilled staff to communicate with the members and␣funding states, manage the finances and run the fellowship schemes, the courses and␣workshops, and the prestigious EMBO Journal. When I turned up in Heidelberg, I was almost dismayed to find that EMBO was only three people who occupied two interconnected rooms at the EMBL; a shout from John made a file appear on his desk instantly. He would take an application for a short-term fellowship, chew his pencil in parallel with his ever-present nicotine gum and jot down the names of three referees: the whole process from receipt to request for advice took only minutes. Long-term fellowships were more challenging as the candidate had to be interviewed in a different state to their home country, but he allocated the interviewers with equal speed and decisiveness. Courses and workshops were based on members’ ideas on which John expanded with his great knowledge of all areas of molecular biology. Organising them often needed “encouragement”, but an invitation from John to organise a course was usually accepted as an honour rather than an imposition. John ran EMBO similar to a military operation, with him as the Sergeant Major, and his traits—efficiency, decisiveness, unbureaucratic, understanding the needs of researchers and judging all activities through the prism of excellence—became, and remain, the hallmarks of EMBO. Even as the organisation added new activities, expanded grudgingly in staff numbers and moved to a separate building on the EMBL campus, these core qualities have remained central. They are John’s legacy. Working with John Maddox at Nature and Michael Stoker at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, John had transitioned from an active researcher to one who shaped the directions of research. When, as John would recount with a twinkle in his eye, a few Nobel Prize winners and his boss suggested that he should take over EMBO and move it to Heidelberg; he felt that he had no choice. That move in 1973 included an epic drive across Europe in a Citroen 2CV laden with files from the former Brussels office in the European Community building. The long-term success of EMBO was not guaranteed as some saw it only as a means to establish the EMBL. As a consequence of the stamp that John put on EMBO though, science has been enriched by both organisations. John was a significant player behind the scenes to make sure the intergovernmental organisation for EMBL came into existence. He was practical in his approach to how a laboratory functions and may well have influenced the design and layout of EMBL. John Kendrew, the first Director of EMBL, established EMBL’s culture and ambition as a world-class laboratory, but the head of EMBO also had a position as Scientific Coordinator. John relished that role as he strode through the corridors to make sure he knew all the scientists and that they knew what was expected of them in terms of performance. He did not tolerate fools, and diplomacy was not his strongest suit. But both EMBO and EMBL benefitted as he reinforced the “excellence” message. Outside that realm, he was well read, loved history, shared great stories with an infective chuckle, collected rare coins and developed such a love of the German version of ravioli called Maultaschen that he brought back a supply whenever he visited Heidelberg even after he moved back to England. John’s career is a great example of someone passionate about science, even if he no longer worked at the bench. John loved to understand different aspects of Life Sciences and to integrate the flood of information coming from many laboratories. On a larger scale, he transformed a vague vision of EMBO and EMBL to the respected organisations that they are today. But he was more than a support actor. He was a warm and welcoming person whose support of excellence made a lasting impact on the lives of thousands of scientists. Memories of John at EMBL and The EMBO Journal—by Iain Mattaj I first met John after joining EMBL as a Group Leader in 1985. Like Frank, I was stunned to learn the whole EMBO operation was run by three people from two offices, one in those days always full of smoke from the small cheroot-like cigars John chain-smoked. My first interactions with John came from his role as Scientific Coordinator at EMBL. Through his presence on selection committees and at faculty meetings, I came to know his commitment to quick decisions and focus on excellence. Roughly a year after joining EMBL, I was walking along the corridor one morning when I was flanked on each side by John and Lennart Philipson, then EMBL’s Director-General. Both laid their arms around my shoulders and explained to me in clear terms that I should apply to EMBO for organising a workshop on ribonucleoprotein function and a practical course on DNA–protein interactions, both topics where EMBO and EMBL lacked a sufficiently visible programme. Later, applications for organising EMBO courses, workshops and conferences queued up and necessitated the creation of evaluation panels, but in those early days, organisers were simply made an offer they could not refuse. I also reviewed numerous submissions to The EMBO Journal and obviously met John’s standard as a referee. Around 1988, he asked me to come to the office when he was away, to choose referees for as many submissions as I felt competent to handle in order to help him with the ever-growing pile of papers on his desk. These days, papers were submitted and referees were chosen by the postal system, and the first complaint from the EMBO administrators was that I was choosing too many US referees and would exhaust their postage budget. When I occasionally came to the office while John was present, he was usually behind his desk, one pencil behind his ear, another in his hand and a cigar between his teeth, copy-editing proofs before that task was transferred to Oxford University Press. In 1991, I joined John as Co-Executive Editor of the journal. He was a very hands-off mentor and left me to my own devices, although he was always ready to help whenever I had a question. The journal had to adapt to two big challenges. First, molecular biology was in a transition from being a small field in which all participants understood each other to becoming a set of methods that were readily applicable to any problem in the Life Sciences. This required a transition from using the EMBO membership as a referee base to a more diverse and more dispersed cohort of referees. The result was that, despite another transition to fax communication that I insisted on when I joined, reviewing papers started to take longer, very much to John’s consternation. The second challenge was that the number of manuscripts continued to grow, and John grudgingly consented to hire the first full-time editor to assist me. In 1994, he moved to ICRF in London, and we continued to run the journal from two separate offices till 2003 when he stepped down. Magically, submission numbers were almost immediately divided into two similar streams. John and I had grown so used to each other’s working style, and to operating independently when in the same office, that communication between the sites was minimal. Indeed, we communicated more regularly and more broadly in the period from 2002 to 2015 as trustees of the Darwin Trust, a charity to support PhD students from less wealthy countries. His commitment to excellence, to making the right decisions, to efficiency and to hard work was as evident there as at EMBO. He was an admirable person and colleague and someone whose work style I tried to use to improve my own. Sadly, the more relaxed, social and family-based period of his life, a time he was greatly enjoying, is now cut short. But his legacy, EMBO, EMBO Journal and in significant part the Darwin Trust, remain a strong testimony to his achievements. Previous ArticleNext Article Read MoreAbout the coverClose modalView large imageVolume 40,Issue 14,15 July 2021This cover highlights the article Phospho-regulation, nucleotide binding and ion access control in potassium-chloride cotransporters by G. Chi, R. Ebenhoch, H. Man, H. Tang, K.L. Dürr and colleagues. The key findings from this multidisciplinary work and additional insights from other recent studies on cation-coupled chloride transporters are discussed in the accompanying News & Views article “Transport unplugged: KCCs are regulated through an N-terminal plug of the ion pathway” by R.K. Flygaard and colleagues. The cover art illustrates cryo-electron microscopy structures of the human potassium chloride transporters KCC1 and KCC3 embedded into a lipid bilayer using MD simulations. A domain-swapped dimer of KCC1 (shown in cyan/orange) with ATP bound to its C-terminal cytoplasmic domain is displayed in front, while a fuzzy representation of phospho-mimetic, auto-inhibited KCC3 (shown in pink/navy) is visible in the background of the bilayer. (Scientific image by Ben Tehan and Norberto Escudero Urquijo) Volume 40Issue 1415 July 2021In this issue RelatedDetailsLoading ...
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