Next week I’ll be blogging from one of the traditional rituals of UK science: the annual conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science – rebranded this year as the British Science Festival but very much the successor of BA meetings going back to 1831.

In the 19^th century the BA conference was the venue for announcing and debating key scientific findings – including the famous Huxley-Wilberforce debate about Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution, at the 1860 Oxford meeting.

These days no one would think of announcing a really important scientific finding at a general interest conference like the British Science Festival. Research results are revealed in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature and Science and at specialist conferences.

But the festival remains a centrepiece of efforts by the UK research community (including social sciences) to communicate with the outside world via the mass media. Newspapers still send science correspondents to cover it, and they generally make space available for stories from the festival.

This year’s gathering, at the University of Surrey in Guildford, will no doubt feature the usual BA mixture of soft stories and serious stuff. The vast programme ranges from wildlife gardening and the science of human attraction to pandemic flu and carbon capture and storage. I’m sure some of it will be fun and some will be interesting. Please keep reading…

The world’s science journalists gathered in London this week for their biennial conference. All the talk in the run-up to the meeting was gloomy – science journalism in decline at best or crisis at worst, as the well-known pressures on traditional printed and broadcast media lead to cuts in specialist coverage.

As the recession deepened over the winter and then swine flu emerged, the organisers (and I should declare an interest, as a member of the conference steering committee) even considered cancelling the event because too few people would attend to make it viable. Thank God we didn’t.

Journalists being journalists, most people left registration to the last minute and there was a torrent of applications over the last two months. In the end the venerable venue, Westminster Central Hall, could take no more and registration was closed at 950 delegates – 60 per cent more than the previous conference in Melbourne two years ago and far more than anyone had dared hope.

It seems amazing that the world has 950 science journalists. And, yes, some of the attendees were “science communications” or PR people. But as far as I could tell from attending sessions (and parties) most delegates were real journalists writing for papers, periodicals and websites – general and specialist – and broadcasting on radio and television.

Certainly there was no sense of science journalism in global crisis at the conference. Yes, jobs have been cut in large news organisations from the BBC to the New York Times but these cuts seem to have been balanced by growth elsewhere. In the developing world, from Asia through Africa to Latin America, science writing is just emerging as a recognised and valued branch of journalism.

Appropriately, the next World Conference of Science Journalists will be held in Cairo in 2011. I can’t wait…

Many of Britain’s science journalists will be feeling sad – and nostalgic – today after hearing that John Maddox died on Sunday at the age of 83. He was the most influential science editor of the 20^th century and created a blueprint for the modern research journal.

In two spells as editor of Nature, from 1966 to 1973 and 1980 to 1995, Maddox converted a staid journal, for which the word “venerable” might have been invented, into a lively news-seeking and news-making publication without sacrificing its scientific authority.

Maddox had earlier made his mark in newspaper journalism, as science correspondent of The Manchester Guardian from 1955 to 1964, where he developed a campaigning style and an appetite for scoops that he carried over to Nature.

His appointment at the Guardian came when science correspondents were still a novelty. The late 1950s were an optimistic period for science and technology, with newspapers showing gung-ho enthusiasm for aerospace, astronomy, nuclear power and medical research. But Maddox managed to delve into the dark side of technology, including a ground-breaking investigation of the 1957 Windscale reactor fire.

He left the Guardian in 1964 for the Nuffield Foundation, where he spent two years leading an influential project to update the school science curriculum (I was to be a beneficiary of his work, studying the Nuffield Physical Sciences A-level course). Maddox returned to Nuffield in the 1970s, serving as the foundation’s director in between his two spells editing Nature.

When Maddox arrived at Nature, the journal was approaching the centenary of its foundation and retained a gentlemanly, old-fashioned aura. It still attracted some first-rate research papers (such as the one by Crick and Watson announcing the discovery of the DNA double helix) but its owners, the Macmillan family, wanted Maddox to shake up the publication in the face of growing competition. Science, its long-term American rival, was benefiting from the shift in scientific power from Europe to the US.

Maddox obliged by transforming the slow and somewhat arbitrary process by which Nature selected papers for publication. He set up an efficient peer review process for routine submissions – though he was quite happy for important papers to be whisked through on his say-so without formal review – and actively solicited contributions from the world’s top scientists. At the same time Maddox gave Nature its first news and features pages, and built a young team of editors and writers who would go on to fill many roles in science journalism elsewhere (including my FT colleagues Alan Cane and Nick Timmins).

In his second term as editor, Maddox was even more determined to raise his journal’s profile. The most controversial coup was first to publish a paper by the late Jacques Benveniste, a French immunologist, who purported to demonstrate the scientific basis of homeopathy – a form of alternative medicine scorned by most scientists – and then to make a highly publicised visit to Benveniste’s lab in the company of James Randi, a famous magician and fraud-buster, who revealed that the experiment was based on a scientific illusion.

Maddox had grown up near Swansea, the son of furnaceman in an aluminium smelter, and his favourite retreat was a cottage deep in rural Wales. But there was little trace of a Welsh accent left by the time Maddox retired finally from Nature. The most distinctive feature of his voice then was the gravely timbre given by a lifetime’s smoking and drinking. When Maddox wrote his flowery but elegant editorials – late in the evening with the nominal deadline already passed – cigarettes and red wine were the standard accompaniment.

Maddox was knighted in 1995 and made an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society – a far rarer distinction – in 2000. He is survived by his wife, the biographer Brenda Maddox, and four grown-up children (including Bronwen Maddox, former FT environment correspondent and now chief foreign commentator of The Times).

John Maddox © The Royal Society