'A giant of British science journalism': Steve Connor, former science editor of The Independent, dies

Steve Connor, the multi-award-winning former science editor of The Independent, has died aged 62, after a long illness.

Days before he passed away on Wednesday, with his wife Ines and step-daughter Marsha at his side, Steve had been nominated for yet another award, by the prestigious Foreign Press Association, for his world exclusive about the possible dawn of “designer babies”.

He won the British science writers’ award five times, UK health journalist of the year three times, was named UK Science Journalist of The Year in 2016, and was four times highly commended as specialist journalist of the year in the UK Press Awards.

Yet it was all achieved with a minimum of fuss and a complete absence of boasting. Although he had earned the right to be considered a star writer, junior colleagues with a fraction of his experience would find Steve treating them as equals.

Christian Broughton, editor of The Independent, said: “Steve was hugely admired throughout the industry, and was always held in the very highest esteem during his time with The Independent. His journalism rightly won him many awards, and brought us many great splashes.

“He commanded respect naturally, speaking quietly and calmly, always with accuracy and authority. A great journalist, and a great colleague, who will be sadly missed.”

Steve first arrived at The Independent in 1990 when he became science correspondent of The Independent on Sunday.

By then he had already established his reputation as a rigorous and courageous journalist, who could spot a story long before the rest of the pack did.

He was one of the first to realise and report on the significance of the looming Aids crisis in the 1980s, his journalism at The New Scientist informing The Search For The Virus, the book that he co-wrote in 1989.

And it was while at The New Scientist in the 1980s that this quiet, unassuming reporter played the lead role in what his former colleague Tom Wilkie described as “the most impossibly romantic Cold War love story”.

“He got sent to a conference in Moscow,” recalled Wilkie, who worked with Steve at The New Scientist and later at The Independent. “He kept finding reasons for going back to the Soviet Union, as it then was.

“We didn’t know why, until it turned out that he was getting married at the Palace of Weddings in Moscow.

“He had fallen in love with Ines, the interpreter he had been assigned at that first conference.

“And Ines already had a daughter, by her former husband, who was an official in the Communist regime.

“It was the most incredible romance.”

At a time when it was very rare for Russians to be living in the UK, and in echoes of the 1980s film Letter to Brezhnev, Steve succeeded in getting his new wife and her daughter to England.

“He was committed to his wife and equally committed to Marsha,” said Wilkie.

“He was immensely proud of her achievements.”

At The Independent, the quiet reporter might rarely have shown the “romantic scientist” within, but there were glimpses.

In the early 1990s his friend and fellow reporter James Cusick was amazed to see Steve driving to The Independent’s old City Road office in a bright orange VW Karmann Ghia sports car. When Cusick asked to borrow the “beautiful machine” in an attempt to impress a date, Steve agreed.

“Steve’s car ran beautifully,” recalled Cusick, “but the date didn’t.”

Inside the newsroom, Steve was the science editor of The Independent on Sunday, alongside Wilkie, who was now science editor of the daily paper, working with a group of science, medical and engineering correspondents who were, in the words of one general reporter, “so well qualified they could have set up their own scientific journal”.

In this impressive company, Steve, an Oxford University zoology graduate, shone.

“And how!” said Dr Wilkie, himself a former particle physicist. “He had the ability to spot what might be a story a week, two weeks, three weeks ahead of time, and the patience to pursue it.”

“When Steve went quiet for a while,” recalled one former news editor, “You knew he would be about to offer you a really big story.”

Steve moved to The Sunday Times in 1995, in the words of one friend “to boost the credibility of its science reporting”, but by 1998 he was back at The Independent, this time as science editor.

He would stay at the newspaper for 18 years, until it ceased printing in March 2016.

Former Independent editor Amol Rajan described him as a “giant of British science journalism”.

Chris Blackhurst, another former editor, said: “Whenever The Independent’s journalism was lauded, Steve’s name was always one of the first to be mentioned. He was a great journalist: brave, diligent and authoritative.”

As science reporting came increasingly to suffer from a tendency to put sensationalism ahead of rigour, Steve, in the words of former chief reporter Cahal Milmo, “remained immune to the flap and fury of a certain type of science story. And he wasn’t afraid to make that clear to his superiors”.

“Many science correspondents,” added Cusick, “know very little about science, so they take somebody else’s words for it.

“Steve wasn’t like that. He wouldn’t do the frivolous stuff. He took science incredibly seriously. And that made news desks take the subject seriously. So simply having him in the newsroom raised the standard.”

His reward was a string of exclusives which often achieved global importance.

“In his very unassuming, humble manner,” said Milmo, “he would pull these jaw-dropping scoops out of the bag.

“All hell would break loose for a number of days, he would be nominated for an award, and then he would go back to quarrying out the next scoop, and then the next one after that.”

“When Steve walked over and said, ‘I think I might have a story…’ you knew to drop whatever you were doing and give him your undivided attention,” said Oliver Duff, the editor of The Independent’s former sister paper the i. “It normally meant two or three front pages, with follow-ups for years.”

“Losing Steve,” added Duff, “is a loss to science journalism and to public understanding of science. He could distil incredibly complex ideas into everyday language without distorting their meaning.

“During 36 years of reporting, he broke major stories on human genome, climate change, Higgs boson, and Crispr gene-editing.

“I feel privileged to have had the chance to work with him.”