Sir John Maddox combined a comprehensive knowledge of science with a fluent pen; talents that made him the foremost scientific journalist and editor of his era. As Editor of Nature, he restored the journal to an unchallenged position as the place to publish interesting research quickly, and did so at a time when Britain’s influence in world science was otherwise declining. His judgments, sometimes quirky but never dull, were always backed by persuasive argument and a sense of humour.

John Royden Maddox was born in Penllergaer, near Swansea, in 1925, the son of Arthur Jack Maddox, a furnaceman at an aluminium plant. He was educated at Gowerton Boys’ County School. From there, aged 15, he won a rare state scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read chemistry, and King’s College London, where he became a physicist.

In 1949 he was appointed lecturer in theoretical physics at the University of Manchester. But after six years he made a complete switch of careers, moving to The Manchester Guardian as science correspondent.

When his career as a journalist began, science writing was established in newspapers but not yet deeply rooted. The mood was optimistic. The revolution in biology originating from the discovery of the structure of DNA two years earlier had hardly begun, but space exploration and the first nuclear power stations were just around the corner.

Maddox was better equipped than most other scientific writers of the day because he knew more. When an insider refused to give him precise details of how the 1957 fire at Windscale nuclear power station had begun, he extracted the story by a long series of questions to which the source agreed to answer either yes or no. No other journalist of the day would have known sufficient physics to ask the right questions.

In 1964 he changed careers again, moving to London to run the Nuffield Foundation’s Science Teaching Project. The plan was to modernise science teaching by producing fresher and more modern materials for teachers to use.

His true life’s work began in 1966 when the publishers Macmillan appointed him Editor of Nature. The journal had been founded in 1869 and had published many of the greatest discoveries in science, including the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and the structure of DNA in 1953.

But by the time Maddox arrived it was in difficulties. The office was piled high with manuscripts, some yellowing with age, and the few staff were overworked. The journal itself looked dated and uncared for. Maddox breezed in with huge enthusiasm, quickly hired a group of young assistants to help to clear the backlog, and gave new impetus to the news and opinion sections. Every afternoon at 5pm the staff would gather around a large table and make snap decisions about that day’s intake of typescripts. Some would be summarily rejected, others accepted on the spot, while the rest were sent to referees for a more considered opinion. Peer review it was not — but Maddox could usually detect the good from the routine at a single glance.

His most creative innovation was to record when each manuscript arrived and include that information when it was published. Scientists could see that really interesting work could hope to appear in Nature in weeks, rather than months. Maddox had correctly identified that Nature’s role was to be, if not the most authoritative of journals, certainly the quickest.

His technique for writing editorials was unusual but effective. He would sit in an armchair and dictate at some speed, while his long-serving secretary, Mary Sheehan, kept up on an electric IBM typewriter. This occasionally produced rather wordy leading articles, but such was his knowledge that they always contained much wisdom as well. He opened an office in Washington, recognising that the centre of gravity of science had crossed the Atlantic and unless Nature could attract US research from under the noses of its closest rival, Science, it would not flourish.

Maddox was always a believer in the possibilities of science, reluctant to accept that it could cause problems as well as solve them. When a wave of environmental pessimism swept over the Western world in the early 1970s he was one of the few to resist. He published a book, The Doomsday Syndrome (1972), denouncing the gloom as overdone.

His desire to be more involved with outside projects led him to leave his editorship — and the managing directorship of Macmillan Journals which he had meanwhile acquired — to launch his own company, Maddox Editorial, which published an upbeat environmental magazine. But the magazine did not prosper, and in 1975 he was rescued by appointment as director of the Nuffield Foundation. In the same year he published Beyond the Energy Crisis: A Global Perspective.