June 8, 2026 — 1:52pm
And so it’s happened. Three years after a devastating brain cancer diagnosis, Professor Richard Scolyer has gone.
I won’t be alone in finding the news of his death, at the age of 59, raw and numbing. It was expected given how much his health had declined in recent weeks but it still feels shocking and sudden and sad.
There is often widespread mourning when a celebrity dies – an actor or a musician we feel like we know from their work. Rich was not a celebrity. He spent all bar the last three years of his professional life virtually unknown outside the medical and cancer research communities.
But there will be grief around the country that this brutal disease has taken his life.
