John Tooze

Tooze was awarded the EMBO Gold Medal and EMBO Membership, both in 1986 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1994.

Tooze served as executive secretary of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) for over 20 years and secretary of the European Molecular Biology Conference (EMBC). In 1982, he founded The EMBO Journal.

Beginning in 1966 Tooze had been writing under the byline “our cell biology correspondent” a regular weekly column for the news and views section of the scientific journal Nature. From March 1968 to Sept 1969 he worked full-time as assistant and later as deputy editor working with the editor-in-chief John Maddox.

Following his PhD, Tooze spent two years working as a postdoctoral researcher working on Bacteriophage genetics with James Watson at Harvard University. He returned to the UK and was appointed a lecturer at King's College London from 1965 to 1968. There he made a series of significant contributions to our understanding of the exocytic and endocytic pathways in neuroendocrine and exocrine cells and the exploitation of these pathways by enveloped animal viruses. He also provided the first evidence that endocytic membranes are used in the morphogenesis of vaccinia and human cytomegalovirus.

John Tooze was born and grew up in a terraced house on Thornbury Road in Perry Barr, Birmingham where he attended Thornbury Road Primary school. At his second attempt he passed the grammar school entrance exam and joined Handsworth Grammar School in Birmingham. In 1955 in the 6th form he won a State Scholarship and an Open Scholarship from Jesus College, Cambridge (BA, 1961). After leaving Handsworth School in 1955 he decided to spend 6 months working as a laborer in the cooperage of Ansells Brewery, Aston while waiting to begin two years of military service in the Royal Army Educational Corps in September 1956. He was discharged as a sergeant in September 1958 and after obtaining his BA from University of Cambridge he went on to earn a PhD in biophysics from King's College London in 1965 studying in the department where Maurice Wilkins and John Randall worked.

John Tooze FRS (16 May 1938 – 19 May 2021) was a British research scientist, research administrator, author, science journalist, former executive director of EMBO/EMBC, director of research services at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute and a vice president at The Rockefeller University.