Datuk Dr Ronald Stephen McCoy was born on 1930-05-05 in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan. His father, Stephen James, worked as a draftsman in Telecoms; the family lived in government quarters on Pasar Road in Kuala Lumpur. His mother taught him at home before primary school so that by the time he entered Pasar Road School in January 1937 he could already read, write and spell. The Japanese occupation interrupted his childhood. As a teenager he worked alongside his father at the Federated Engineers plant (then under Japanese wartime control), later recalling curry mee brought from home and the monthly rice ration that helped the family survive. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he later said, first registered as relief that the occupation would end. Only afterward, especially after reading John Hersey's Hiroshima, did the human cost reshape his conscience.
After the war he reached Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur, where headmaster F. Daniel and teachers such as Ganga Singh left a lasting mark. McCoy represented the school in hockey, cricket, soccer and athletics; captained house and school sides; edited The Victorian; won the Treacher and Rodger scholarships; and served as School Captain. The Victorian recorded that no other boy had been School Captain and Rodger Scholar in the same year while combining study and activities so successfully. In 1949 he joined the first batch of medical students at the University of Malaya in Singapore. He trained at General Hospital Kuala Lumpur, took Membership of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (London) in 1963 after postgraduate work in the United Kingdom, joined Assunta Hospital as a consultant in 1965, and about nine years later helped develop Pantai Medical Centre as one of its founding specialists. He practised obstetrics and gynaecology for roughly four decades and retired in February 1996. Malay Mail and later tributes credit him with about 20,000 deliveries. He served as president of the Malaysian Medical Association in 1995, pressed for universal coverage and equitable access, and, as MMA president, publicly defended plantation workers' health rights when ministers criticised the association.
Nuclear abolition became his second vocation. In 1986 he encountered International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), which had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for documenting the medical impossibility of responding to nuclear war. In 1987 he founded Malaysian Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and later served eight years as IPPNW co-president. In 1995 he joined Malaysia's team at the International Court of Justice when the Court considered the legality of nuclear weapons use. In 1996 he sat on Australia's Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. After the failed 2005 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review, he emailed IPPNW colleagues proposing a grassroots campaign modelled on the landmine ban movement. "We can call it an International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, with the acronym ICAN," he wrote. ICAN was launched in 2007, grew into a global coalition, helped drive the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. McCoy attended the Oslo ceremony that December. He often said the babies he had delivered deserved a world without nuclear weapons, and that nuclear disarmament was a form of preventive medicine. He also opposed nuclear power for Malaysia on grounds of cost, waste and accident risk, and remained active in civil society, including Aliran, transparency work and Victorian alumni philanthropy.
He died on 2026-09-01 at age 96. His son David McCoy confirmed the death to BFM 89.9. Cause of death was not made public. ICAN, the MMA, Malaysian media and civil society paid tribute to a soft-spoken doctor who, as one colleague remembered, would say "Call me Ronnie" while refusing to kowtow to power.
