Charles Richard Boddington Joyce (August 9, 1923 – August 11, 2015)

by Bernard Jambon, on behalf of all your friends at Mapi and SAC members
Dick,
You did not have permission to die. But once again, as usual, you did not wait to get our permission.
With you, we have lost an extraordinary friend. One who has guided us for 20 years. One who put us back on track or encouraged us to go off the rails. One who, by your humanism and sense of humor, made us laugh and sometimes cry. Most of all, you were the one who always made us question ourselves.
We already miss you tremendously. Through all our memories, you will continue to guide us and make us smile.
“Tchao mon pote.”
Bernard

by Nick Palmer, Director of Policy, European Coalition to End Animal Experiments (ECEAE), British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), and Ismene Joyce
Dick Joyce was a polymath to the point of implausibility, fitting in segments of half a dozen different careers into one very happy life. He grew up during the Second World War decrypting Japanese diplomatic messages at Bletchley Park and moved on to Jerusalem, where he spent 18 months eavesdropping on members of the embryonic Jewish government. On July 22, 1946, he was blown up at the British headquarters at the King David Hotel, where he sustained a back injury that would trouble him for the rest of his life. This traumatic incident in no way diminished his affection for the Jewish and Muslim population of the country that went on to become Israel. Back in England, he then studied Economics at Cambridge, followed by first class Honours in Moral Sciences (as Psychology was then amusingly called, as he observed), followed by a BSc. in Physiology and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology. After a USPHS Fellowship at the University of Cincinnati, he became a Reader in Psychopharmacology at the University of London and joint chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the London Hospital Medical College.
With his second wife Ismene, son Nick and daughter Cressida, he was seduced into industry by the offer of leadership of the newly created group for Methodology (later Project Innovation) in the Medical Department of Ciba-Geigy (subsequently Novartis) where the enlightened Swiss management gave him his head to delve into whatever line of enquiry he thought fruitful. Meanwhile, he had become Visiting Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry at the University of Berne, and Psychology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, as well as a Foreign Associate of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences at the Boulder Campus of the University of Colorado.
At various times, he was a member of UN, WHO, MAPI Research Institute, UK and French advisory boards and Swiss committees on drug dependence, clinical trial methodology, patient and physician compliance, Quality of Life methodology and complementary medicine. He served on the editorial boards of several journals, and himself published more than 200 papers on cell-membrane ionic transport, medical ethics, the effect upon the response to therapeutic interventions of “non-specific factors” such as placebo and individual attributes of physician and patient, as well as editing five books on these and other topics. His passion, however, was a struggle to write poetry and, much later, an autobiography, a novel and short stories. He encouraged everyone around him to explore life – in my case Parliamentary life – and enriched the world around him. His beloved family – wife, son, daughter, daughter-in-law and grandson – survive him.
Towards the end, he reflected, “I’ve led (or been led by) a fantastically happy life. Which parts were influential? Either none, if everything happens by chance; or all, if everything is predetermined.” Dick Joyce finished as he had lived, curious, enquiring and humorous to the end. Some called his sense of humour British. Others knew it to be entirely Dickish.