Last November 2021, Juan Antonio Micó, a driving force of our Observatory of Pain, left us. We cannot and should not forget the importance of Doctor Micó to this Observatory. Juan Antonio had a core idea that he always applied to his work: “human capital is the most important thing ”.
He always had it clear and that’s how he knew how to transmit it to us. It is useless to invest in technology if there is no one who can handle it. It is useless to set up studies that cannot be finished. In short, it is useless to leave a legacy that no one is going to perpetuate. With this idea, he managed several working groups, in particular the Observatory of pain, with Dr. Inmaculada Failde in charge of it.
Doctor Micó has previously worked in the field of pain from a more experimental point of view, but with the Observatory, he wanted to take a step towards the epidemiology of Chronic Pain, with a more social perspective. Thanks to their support and vision, the Observatory has been training professionals and researching about Chronic Pain for more than 10 years, and that idea that began with 3 researchers has become a consolidated group of many members and many successes.
But Juan Antonio was much more than a researcher. He was always concerned about the training and advance of the Observatory’s members. For him and for Dr. Failde, the researchers of the groups were always projects for the future. They knew how to see our aptitudes and possibilities, betting hard for the advance of our careers.
Juan Antonio used to say that it was the responsibility of the university staff to promote the training of new staff because they themselves would not be there if no one had opted for them at the time. That idea influenced his life as a mentor. After his death, we all have the huge legacy that he left us.
In his most human facet, we will always remember Juan Antonio as a close, concerned, generous and energetic person with a fun and acid sense of humor. In his memory, we will always remember how he arrived at the restaurants where we used to have business lunches on his motorcycle with a leather jacket and how he never missed the opportunity to ask us about our progress and future projects.
That is how Juan Antonio was and that’s how we like to remember him. Not only because of his academic and research achievements, which were many but because of his human side and because of his legacy.
Today we are what we are, in large part, thanks to you. Goodbye forever, Juan Antonio.
