Instead of publishing my letter, I got a personal reply back from the editor telling me I’d got it all wrong (I hadn’t - story true as told)

And then a few years later JW was revealed as a racist and Nature published a very negative report on him. So I wrote a correspondence to Nature about change of time since the fawning in 2003

(It was a few years later than I told him it was me, he didn’t mind too much)

I heard about all of this and was outraged by Nature’s lack of backbone. I wrote to Private Eye and they published a story. This turned out to be awkward for M as everyone at Nature thought he must have written in

How can you retract someone’s opinion of a book? The next week Nature published a grovelling editorial distancing themselves from the review, without giving the true reason why.

JW hated the review. He phoned the Nature editor to complain and said he would not attend the “50th anniversary of the DNA structure discovery” event in the Science museum (sponsored by Nature) unless it was retracted.

Afraid so! You have to choose your moment