Donald Kennedy, editor of the prestigious journal Science for the past seven years, announced today that he would retire at the end of this year. The news signals a close to the latest chapter in Mr. Kennedy’s peripatetic career, during which he served as president of Stanford University for 12 years, beginning in 1980, and before that as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for two years, in the late 1970s.

Trained as a biologist at Harvard, Mr. Kennedy originally focused on gene-environment interaction. His academic work led to increasing interest in the environment, and from the environment to public policy. At Science, he oversaw expansion of the magazine’s Web site and online products. Despite his plan to retire, Mr. Kennedy said he would stay at the helm of the journal until its publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, picks a successor. The association is convening a search committee, headed by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and former Caltech president David Baltimore, to find that person. —Josh Fischman