Botanist ended his adventurous life in a Swiss clinic, listening to Beethoven

When the celebrated plant ecologist David Goodall was interviewed on his 104th birthday last month, his response was typically forthright. ‘‘I greatly regret having reached that age. I’m not happy. I want to die. It’s not sad, particularly. What is sad is if one is prevented.’’

As it happened, he was not ‘‘prevented’’, even though there were those who had opposed him travelling to Switzerland to end his life. While doctors considered whether to try to detain him in Australia, he boarded a plane in Perth, wearing a jumper that bore the slogan ‘‘ageing disgracefully’’, on May 2. He was not terminally ill, but had been a member of Exit International for

20 years. The group created an online crowdfunding page to pay to upgrade his ticket from economy to business class and rapidly reached its target.

He flew to Bordeaux, where he visited family for the last time, and then on to Basel, where the staff of the Life Cycle Service helped him to bring to an end the remarkable life of a renowned scientist who was married three times, loved acting, but never bought a television and shunned radio.

Only two years earlier he had been fighting for the right to carry on working, at the Centre for Ecosystem Management at Edith Cowan University in Perth. He had been one of the first scientists to talk about the greenhouse effect, and was regarded as the godfather of ‘‘quantitative ecology’’, applying the numbercrunching rigour of statistics and mathematics to his discipline. He developed computer programs for classifying vegetation and modelling ecosystems, and was an early adopter of the Fortran programming language. He was still programming for his modelling work until two years ago.

The scope of his research was vast, taking in the growth rates of lettuce and cocoa; the growth of lichen in Lapland; the management of eucalyptus forests; the alpine grasslands of Victoria; desert seed banks; and the desert ecosystems of northern Egypt, among many others. Perhaps his overarching achievement was his editorship of the

36-volume standard work Ecosystems of the World.

David William Goodall was one of two children born in Edmonton, north London. He went to Imperial College London, choosing botany over biology because he felt it was a stronger department.

In the 1930s he travelled extensively in Europe and spent a month in Dortmund, Germany, where he recalled living with a ‘‘Nazi family’’. Graduating in 1935, he started working on his PhD under the auspices of the Research Institute of Plant Physiology, undertaking research into the best use of fertilisers, with the aim of maximising food production. It was considered vital war work. ‘‘Not only was I exempt from conscription, I was not allowed to join the forces,’’ he said. ‘‘I did join the Home Guard, but that was undemanding.’’ He received his PhD in 1941 for his thesis Studies in the Assimilation of the Tomato Plant.

A year earlier he had married Veronica Kirwin. They had a son, Patrick, who studied economics, then medicine. The marriage did not last.

He worked in Australia for the first time in 1948 and married Muriel King in Melbourne a year later after proposing to her in Switzerland. They had two sons, Glyn and Peter, and a daughter, Karen. The children did not see much of him because he was frequently away on field trips, and even when at home he tended to concentrate on work.

Once again the marriage did not last. David and Muriel divorced in 1974. Two years later, Goodall married Ivy Nelms.

Away from science, Goodall’s greatest enthusiasm was probably acting. He credited acting with maintaining his health. As his century approached, he said: ‘‘I can’t walk as well as I did, and I can’t see as well as I did, but the rest of my body seems to be working perfectly well.’’ Remembering lines was good for the brain, he said, and working with young actors was good for the heart.

An adventurous traveller, he played tennis until he was 90 and in recent years he was flown by gyrocopter to a remote area of Western Australia to visit a sustainable cattle station. Last year he visited the Abrolhos Islands off Australia’s west coast, where he had conducted crayfish research in the 1960s.

While his mind remained sharp until the end, physical decline was inevitable. This year he was injured in a fall and lay on the floor of his flat for two days until his housekeeper found him. He then attempted to take his life and was in hospital for five weeks.

Dying was part of life, he said. ‘‘Why should it make me sad? I don’t regard it as grim, I regard it as natural.’’ Two days before he died he was asked what his final thoughts would be. ‘‘I’ll be thinking about the needle and hoping they aim right.’’

He spent his last full day visiting Basel’s botanical gardens with three of his grandchildren. His last meal was his favourite: fish and chips followed by cheesecake.

On the day, as Beethoven’s Ode to Joy played, he was injected with a barbiturate, turning a wheel himself to let the solution flow through his veins. He gave it 15 seconds, then said: ‘‘It’s a bit slow, isn’t it?’’ – The Times