Abstract
Mr. President, Margo and family, distinguished guests, and fellow mineralogists: It is indeed a great honor to be the Roebling Medal citationist, but it is also with great sadness that Joe Boyd, the recipient, is not among us to celebrate the occasion and to personally receive MSA’s most prestigious award. In nominating Joe, I was joined by a distinguished group of scientists that included Doug Smith (Texas), Dean Presnall (Texas), Peter Nixon (Leeds), Nick Sobolev (Novosibersk), and jointly by Rick Carlson, Steve Shirey, and Yingwei Fei (Carnegie), all of whom had close associations with Joe, and all of whom commented at depth on Joe’s illustrious career. Joe’s excursion into the geosciences began at Harvard (1949–1953), with rugged fieldwork on the Yellowstone pyroclastics, and experimental studies in the equally rugged environment of George Kennedy’s laboratory. Fieldwork and tightly coupled petrochemistry, backed by experiment, were hallmarks of Joe’s career, and as recognizable as his distinctive handwriting, these were signatures to each of his creative contributions. Joe’s work with George Morey at the Geophysical Laboratory in the 1950s produced the first P-T stability curve for tremolite, and solid solutions among members of the amphibole mineral group were also explored. His experimental inventiveness are marvels to behold: He was possibly the first, in 1954, to couple a heating stage to an X-ray diffractometer to record mineral transformations in action; the Boyd and England high pressure (5 GPa), and high temperature (1750°C) press, in which diamond was synthesized in 1960, can still be seen, some now modified, in many laboratories around the world. This press has advanced both the science and the careers of many a noteworthy experimentalist; Joe was the driving force in automating electron …
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