Born in 1938, John was educated at Handsworth Grammar School Birmingham, Cambridge University (BA, 1961, PhD at King's College London with Wilkins and Randall 1965). He did postdoctoral work on bacteriophage with Watson in Harvard. He returned to a lectureship at King's College London where he studied vesicle trafficking and animal viruses from 1965-68.

In that period, he was also the anonymous Nature ‘Cell Biology Correspondent’. He then worked for Nature followed by 20 years as Executive Secretary of EMBO. He founded in EMBO Journal in 1982. He returned to the UK to work as a director for ICRF/CRUK before becoming a Vice-President of the Rockefeller University. He died in 2021.