John Richard Gallon 1944–2003

The premature death of John Gallon, from cancer of the colon, on 10 August 2003, after a mercifully short illness, brought heartfelt sadness to all his friends. John was simply the loveliest, most loving, most straight-forward and honest human being that I have known. He brought joy and harmony to everyone he met and to everything he did. His endless enthusiasm for life was a breath of fresh air. He had a gift, usually by some trivial remark or other, of making everyone around him feel at ease, however, stuffy or tense the circumstances. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what it was about John that made his full life so full of fun – some of this must surely have resided in his ability to laugh about and at himself, whatever the context. As far as I am aware, John was the first member of his family to become an academic. His father was a bridge-building engineer, which in a sense formed the foundations around which John lived his life. He studied things that grew in the water under bridges – his central scientific goal was reconciling N2 fixation and O2 production by photosynthesis in cyanobacteria, whilst at the personal level he always strived to build bridges (particularly between fractious academics). John was born in Middlesborough on 24 October 1944. In 1963 he went up to Oxford with an Open Exhibition at the Queens College. After graduation he stayed on to complete his D.Phil (1970) – Tyrosine Decarboxylase and Related Reactions in (Higher) Plants. These formative years established what was to become a lifetime's interest in nitrogen metabolism and a widening of his musical repertoire from ‘Childrens Favorites’ to the dizzy heights of ‘The Clash’ and Bob Dylan. Most important, however, in 1969 he married Chris, his ‘Pink Toothbrush’. His horizons were broadened even further with a fellowship (1970–72) in Prairie Regional Laboratory, Saskatoon. This period marked the start of his seminal contributions to research on N2 fixation in non-heterocystous cyanobacteria and particularly the relationships between N2 fixation, photosynthesis and respiration. It is particularly fitting that his posthumous paper, published in this issue of New Phytologist (pp. 545–555), draws together his three decades of research and leaves us with an elegant model that may ultimately help us to understand and to explain how the unicellular O2-evolving cyanobacterium Gloeothece can seemingly do the impossible and fix nitrogen, which requires an anaerobic environment. After the prairies John made a brief return to Oxford before being appointed as a lecturer at Swansea in 1973. He quickly became proficient in three academic arenas (research, teaching and administration) and progressed smoothly through the ranks to senior lecturer (1982), reader (1988) and finally professor (1993) shortly after the honour of a D.Sc (1991) in recognition of his contributions to the biochemistry of cyanobacteria. Though firmly rooted in Swansea, John was most definitely a wandering academic, spending periods of sabbatical leave in Bratislava, Nebraska, Canberra and Russia and ‘enduring’ numerous cruises to the Caribbean and the Baltic. He bore the dreadful tedium of these latter adventures with typical cheerful fortitude –‘You do realize I’m only doing this because the organisms I need only grow there and nowhere else’. He became widely known and respected internationally as an imaginative and original researcher who was driven by curiosity and enjoyment of what he was doing rather than by ratings for numbers of publications and grant income or a desire to be in the limelight. Just as you might anticipate from a man who combined full blooded enthusiasm for life with a willingness to share everything he knew about science and life John was a supremely good teacher. His jokes (almost invariably against himself) and community singing, or ‘metabolism to music’, made a unique and indelible impression on all his students. Concerning administration John had no time for the back stabbing that all too frequently accompanies university politics. However, his long service on the Council of the University College of Swansea, not to mention the minefield of Technical Staff Appeal Boards, clearly reveal that his openness, honesty and sound judgement were greatly valued. These characteristics also made him an excellent external examiner. On the international stage he served on numerous committees including those of the Phytochemical Society of Europe and the Harden Conferences. Away from academia John was blessed with an extremely happy home life through Chris and his two daughters Charlotte and Vickie, who never did fully come to terms with the unbridled enthusiasm with which he greeted each and every new day. At home his interests centred around collecting (otherwise known by his family as hoarding). The Whitby paintings that adorned his home were a constant reminder of his northern roots. But, his real passion had to be coins. Many of you will know that John had the arcane habit of disappearing at the end of business meetings only to return several hours later clutching what he claimed to be the elusive coin that had finally completed his collection. This happened on at least 20 occasions during his association with New Phytologist. Most eccentric of all however, was his ‘stamp collection’– or rather his boxes and boxes of envelopes with blue dot franking marks associated with automatic sorting – perhaps the closest equivalent to cyanobacteria, philatelically speaking. John's passing was a milestone in the century old history of New Phytologist. He was one of its longest serving editors and the first to die in active service to the Trust. His eclectic contributions will be sadly missed. He had impeccable judgment when it came to long-term strategic planning and a gift for encouraging all authors, even when the standard of the science contributed was well below that acceptable to the journal. Less well known, perhaps, was his encyclopedic knowledge, usually revealed only after a particularly good dinner, of the reproductive proclivities of higher primates (i.e. he was a supreme raconteur of gorilla jokes). Dearest John, we sadly miss your infectious laughter, not to mention your aposematic blue-green blazers.

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