SCOPE was set up in 1970, as the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) committee devoted to environmental problems, and I was elected a member of SCOPE at a meeting in Canberra in August 1971. I attended meetings of the Scientific Committee in Paris in January 1973 and March 1975, and of the General Assembly and Scientific Committee in Kiel, Germany in October 1973 and in Paris in May 1976.

One of the principal functions of SCOPE was to produce reports by small groups of internationally chosen natural and social scientists about important environmental problems of a scientific nature. Six of these had been produced between 1971 and 1975, but there were difficulties in distributing them. After the May 1976 meeting the Executive Committee decided to secure a commercial publisher, and in December 1976, concluded a contract with John Wiley and Sons Ltd. (UK), initially for four years. The contract was renewed in 1980. As part of the agreement SCOPE undertook to appoint an Editor-in-Chief to be responsible for the editorial content of the Reports. I was appointed to this post by the Executive Committee in October 1976.

Apart from attending all meetings of the Executive Committee and visiting the offices of John Wiley and Sons in Chichester, England, after these meetings, I developed an extensive correspondence with Gilbert White, the President of SCOPE, Ronald Keay, Executive Secretary of The Royal Society, who was Treasurer of SCOPE, Vassily Smirnyagin, the Executive Secretary of SCOPE and especially with Dr Howard Jones, John Wiley's Molecular and Earth Sciences Editor (the Jones' file is more than one centimetre thick in my Basser Library files, MS 143/12/1 to MS143/12/5). The changed arrangements led to much better production and sales (in addition to copies distributed by SCOPE), the figures rising from about 300, before the new arrangements, to between 750 and 1,400.

Because I had taken on the major task of writing an account of the global eradication of smallpox earlier that year, I handed over my responsibilities as Editor-in-Chief to Dr R. E. Munn on 31 December, 1980.