Professor Harry Smith (1935–2015)

Harry Smith FRS. Founding Editor of Molecular Ecology (1992) and Managing Editor from 1992 to 2008. Photo credit: Elinor Smith. On 9 February 2015, Molecular Ecology lost its founding editor, Harry Smith FRS. Harry was not only one of the world's foremost researchers in the area of plant photomorphogenesis, but he also had a large impact on how science is communicated through his innovative contributions to science publishing. While Harry's death represents a great loss to the academic community, many of us additionally mourn the loss of a trusted friend and colleague. We will miss his charm, wit and wisdom. Harry was born on 19 September 1935 and educated at Manchester University, where he earned a degree in Botany in 1959. He received a PhD from the University of Wales three years later for work on how gravity affected the growth and form of woody plants. He then moved to Yale University for a 2-year postdoctoral stint with Arthur Galston. It was in Galston's laboratory that Harry initiated his lifelong research programme on how plants sense and respond to light signals. Harry returned to the UK in 1964 as a lecturer at the University of London (1964–1968) and the University of Manchester (1968–1971). He was passionate about science and quickly became recognized for the clarity of his thinking and writing and the incisiveness of his contributions to scientific discussions. In 1971, he obtained a Chair of Plant Physiology at the University of Nottingham, and then in 1978, he moved just down the road to take a Chair of Botany at the University of Leicester. Following his retirement in 2001, he returned to the University of Nottingham as a Special Professor in the Faculty of Science. In terms of scientific contributions, Harry is best known for his discovery that phytochrome, a pigment that plants use to detect light, also allows them to perceive colour. Simply put, he showed that plants can detect changes in the wavelength of light they receive, such as that caused by shading from other plants, and can respond by changing their growth habit. This shade avoidance response contributes importantly to competitive interactions among plants and also has major implications for agriculture. Professor Smith has elucidated the main photosensory mechanism by which plants respond to the light environment. He has shown how developmental responses to shading are mediated by the phytochrome family of photoreceptors. He has been a pioneer in investigation of the spectral signals of proximity to other plants, leading to the concepts of “proximity perception”, “neighbour detection” and “shade avoidance” that are fundamental to the understanding of plant-plant interactions. Through the use of mutants and transgenic plants he has been able to define the respective roles of the family of phytochrome photoreceptors and provided a molecular framework for understanding and manipulating competitive interactions between plants. Harry was equally passionate about scientific communication and first became involved in scientific publishing during his PhD stay at the University of Manchester. Because of the explosive expansion of the scientific literature in the second half of the 20th century, Harry felt that biologists needed a means for keeping on top of new developments in their field. Working with Robert Maxwell, co-founder of Pergamon Press, Harry helped launch Current Advances in Plant Sciences, which published abstracts from across the plant sciences, and provided a subject categorized listing of titles, authors and bibliographic details, allowing scientists to rapidly search for papers of interest. In 1980, Harry expanded this service across the biological sciences with the launch of Current Awareness in Biological Sciences. In the early 1970s, Harry became acquainted with Bob Campbell, who was rapidly building the Blackwell Science Publication List. Harry felt that scientific journals were too conservative and, over a period of two decades, convinced Blackwell Science to support the launch of three new interdisciplinary journals: Plant Cell and the Environment (1978-), Molecular Ecology (1992-) and Global Change Biology (1995-). In the 2000s, he worked with Wiley-Blackwell to launch a sister journal to Molecular Ecology, titled Molecular Ecology Resources. All four journals have been extraordinarily successful, in part because of Harry's uncanny ability to identify research areas that were ripe for expansion, but poorly served by scientific journals at the time. However, equally important to the success of ‘Harry's journals’ was Harry's commitment to a well-run editorial office, with Harry serving as both Managing and Chief Editor during the critical early days of Plant Cell and the Environment and Molecular Ecology and Managing and Founding Editor of Global Change Biology and Molecular Ecology Resources. The rapid review and publication times of Harry's journals contrasted favourably with competitor journals at the time and contributed to their success. At Molecular Ecology, for example, submissions to the journal increased at a rate of ~40% for close to a decade after it was launched! Harry managed the tremendous growth by hiring members of his highly talented family to help out in the editorial office. Harry's son Michael created a manuscript management system that was more effective and user-friendly than most of those employed by the journal publishing industry. Likewise, Harry's wife, Elinor, and his daughter, Siân Lynch, served as journal secretaries for many years. Elinor and Siân were not only highly competent, but along with Harry, they brought a personal touch to journal management that is absent from most other scientific journals. Siân left the journal in the early 2000s for a mathematics teaching position, but Harry and Elinor carried on until Harry finally retired from day-to-day involvement in publishing in 2008. Those of us closely associated with Molecular Ecology, however, continued to benefit from his guidance and advice right up to this year. Harry often told me that while he was not a molecular ecologist, it was Molecular Ecology and its associated scientific community that he felt closest to. I think this was partly because the nascent discipline of molecular ecology coalesced around the journal. As a consequence, Harry touched most of the community through his personal and friendly emails as he guided the journal through its first 16 years. Also, many of the pioneers in the discipline came to know Harry through their service on the Molecular Ecology editorial board. Copied below are a few of the messages that were sent to me following Harry's death, which provide a sense of how much he will be missed by our community (and the debt of gratitude owed to Harry): Harry is survived by his wife, Elinor, as well as their three children, Michael, Siân and Caroline.

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