Professor John M Goldman, Editor-in-Chief of Bone Marrrow Transplantation and NPG’s longest-serving academic editor, sadly passed away on Christmas Eve leaving a strong legacy. Here, Martin Delahunty, Associate Director of Academic Journals at Nature Publishing Group, pays tribute to an influential colleague.
A leading figure in the global fight against blood cancer.
It was with great sadness and shock that I learnt of the death of Professor John M Goldman, Editor-in-Chief for our journal Bone Marrow Transplantation and Emeritus Professor of Imperial College London. John died on Christmas Eve from cancer of the bile duct after a short illness, aged 75.
Throughout his forty-year career and until his death he was a leading figure in the global fight against blood cancer. He made huge practical differences to helping save lives for example by helping establish the Anthony Nolan Trust Donor Registry and in the 1990s convincing Novartis to manufacture the then experimental leukemia drug imatinib, which now accounts for over £3 billion annual sales and successfully treats thousands of patients worldwide.
John was the original founding Editor for Bone Marrow Transplantation and was NPG’s longest-serving academic editor. The first issue appeared in May 1986, initially publishing three times a year and thereafter bi-monthly. By 1990, it began monthly publication and then in 1997 to fortnightly.
Even with Bone Marrow Transplantation, John remain focussed on his ultimate objective of the published research helping to increase the number of patients who could be treated and benefit from allogeneic or autologous stem cell transplant procedures.
John founded and was President of both the European Hematology Association and the European Bone Marrow Transplant Group. He was Chairman of the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry (IBMTR, now CIBMTR) from 1998-2000. He also created charities, such as LEUKA.
Following his retirement from Hammersmith in 2004, Goldman focused on global health issues and developed the International CML Foundation. In recent years, he campaigned to reduce cancer drug prices in developing countries.
I first met John in 1998 when working at WB Saunders, and he supported me with a number of publishing projects. John understood publishing and in his career published over 700 scientific papers and many books. He was also genuinely unique, in that to balance his medical expertise, he had a strong classics background and enjoyed reading Saki, Wilde, Shakespeare, Greek mythology, and histories of the Napoleonic wars. My colleagues Pooja Aggarwal, Lucinda Haines and I have often been entertained by John’s life stories, the most famous and oft-related was that of when he once drove from London to India with a group of his Oxford classmates. When their party was briefly imprisoned by Iranian authorities, they escaped by drugging their guards with barbiturates.
We are indebted to John M. Goldman for his contribution to Nature Publishing Group and Bone Marrow Transplantation will stand as a strong legacy.
Some of the many more eloquent and detailed tributes can be found at:
https://www.cml-foundation.org/
https://www.cibmtr.org/ReferenceCenter/Documents/NewsEvents/Goldman%20Memorial%20-%20Web.pdf
https://www.ehaweb.org/news/eha-news/page-406/
Finally, in John’s memory his family have also established a JustGiving site:
https://www.justgiving.com/JohnGoldman
Martin Delahunty
Associate Director, Academic Journals, Nature Publishing Group.