John Maddox, editor of Nature from 1966 to 1973 and again from 1980 to 1995, died on 12 April 2009, according to the current editor Philip Campbell's obituary. During his first stint he laid the foundations for Nature as it is today. He replaced cronyism with an impartial system of peer review, but he liked to say that the 1953 paper on the structure of DNA would never have passed peer review. He also established a strong tradition of journalism in Nature, and he established the voice of Nature in unsigned editorials, although the voice was often unmistakably his own. (Nature 2009;458:807, doi:10.1038/458807a)
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