He used his own dying and death to help others

 

Now and then one comes across a story that really touches the heart of what it means to be human, and to live - and sometimes die - as positively as possible.  Dr. Richard Scolyer appears to have been such a man.

Richard Scolyer, who has died aged 59, was a surgical pathologist who, with his colleague Georgina Long, revolutionised the treatment of advanced melanoma (skin cancer); in 2023 he became his own "guinea pig" after developing glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive brain cancers.

As co-directors of the Melanoma Institute Australia, dedicated to researching the lethal skin cancer that afflicts Australia more than any other nation, the two scientists pioneered a treatment which involves administering immunotherapy drugs before surgery so that the immune system is triggered by the whole cancer rather than the few remaining cells after tumour removal. Their work lifted the survival rate for advanced melanoma from less than 5 per cent in 2010 to more than 50 per cent today, saving thousands of lives.

But by 2024, when the pair were named joint Australian of the Year, Scolyer was facing his own cancer battle. It began during a visit to Poland in May 2023 when he found himself convulsing on the floor of his hotel room. An MRI scan carried out in Kraków showed a mass in his temporal lobe, and he knew immediately that it was bad news. A subsequent biopsy performed in Sydney diagnosed an aggressive grade 4 IDH-wildtype glioblastoma and Scolyer was given six to eight months to live.

"I didn't want to die. I loved my life," he wrote in a memoir, Brainstorm. Only three weeks earlier Scolyer, a keen sportsman, had represented Australia at the World Triathlon Multisport Championships. Now he had been given a death sentence: "It didn't sit right with me… to just accept certain death without trying something. It's an incurable cancer. Well bugger that!"

Under a team led by Georgina Long, Scolyer became "Patient Zero" for a radical form of treatment based on the approach developed for melanoma, which involved delaying surgery for two weeks while immunotherapy drugs were administered, allowing the immune system to train on millions of cancer cells. Scolyer decided to go public with his treatment, gaining thousands of followers on social media.

The regimen carried many dangers. Even a short delay in surgery could allow the tumour to grow, and there was a high chance the drugs' side-effects could kill him. "There was understandable resistance from some in the medical community," he recalled.

But early results were promising. When the tumour that had been removed was analysed, Long's team found that there had been an explosion of cancer-fighting immune cells. Then in May 2024, an MRI scan revealed that the tumour had not returned, though it did not mean the cancer was cured: "It's just nice to know that it hasn't come back yet, so I've still got some more time to enjoy my life," Scolyer said.

But in March this year, days before Scolyer was due to part in a charity cycling event in Tasmania, a brain scan showed that the cancer had progressed. "Not the best day ever," he told his followers on Facebook.

His death, three years after diagnosis, far exceeded the life expectancy for his tumour, and a clinical trial based on his treatment is now underway at Duke University in the US.

There's more at the link.

Effectively, Dr. Scolyear allowed his own body, and the process of his own dying and death, to be used for treatment and further research.  As if to acknowledge his self-sacrifice, he survived his cancer for far longer than the norm for gioblastoma sufferers, thereby allowing a great deal of research to be conducted that will benefit others in future.  Sadly, it couldn't benefit him, apart from giving him longer to set an example to the rest of us.

A tribute to him has been posted on the home page of Melanoma Institute Australia.  There are many replies to it from those who remember him with love and kindness.  I'll let this one speak for all of them.

If it were not for his brilliant work, I too would not be here today, having had lifesaving Immunotherapy for my late stage Melanoma diagnosis.

Words alone cannot express my gratitude and thanks, together with the sadness that you too were not able to have been afforded the opportunity of a second chance of life.

May you rest in peace Professor.

Indeed.  May choirs of angels sing him to his rest.

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 315

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

Most readers will be aware of Mike Oldfield, the progressive rock genius who first took the music world by storm in 1972 with "Tubular Bells".  He's released many albums since then, and even in retirement remains a best-selling performer.

For this morning, I thought you'd enjoy an interview with him and a preview performance of his 2008 "Music Of The Spheres".  It achieved the distinction of being #1 on the Classical Music charts in the UK in the first week of its appearance, as well as reaching #9 on the overall UK Albums chart - a superb performance across multiple genres.  It remains one of my favorites among all his releases.

I'll post the interview first, and follow it with a music-only video of the full album.  Enjoy!

Peter

An "angry bear" opines on the soaring stock market - and what may bring it down

 

We've met Jared Dillian before in these pages.  He's an investment adviser and analyst with a highly respected track record in the industry.  He's not a happy man these days.

You should never let your emotions get in the way of investing, but I am starting to get angry at this bull market ... You want my thoughts—I will give you my thoughts. But the one data point that you should know is that the stock market is now the most overvalued in history, more so than 2000 or even 1929.

. . .

My friend Helene Meisler tweeted recently that if you weren’t around for the dot-com bubble, now you know what it was like in the dot-com bubble. The difference being that so many more people own stocks this time around. It is estimated that 62% of Americans own stocks. If we have a 50% bear market, it’s going to be Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. We are really going to be questioning the wisdom of plowing all our savings into the stock market via 401(k)s. Let’s hope that doesn’t come to pass because the consequences would be too terrible to contemplate, but knowing markets and karma, that is probably exactly what is going to happen.

. . .

I mean, the consensus view is that all this [AI] capex is going to go to waste, so maybe the out-of-consensus view is that it is actually needed. This is one of these situations in which I am glad I am 52 years old. The internet was also the future of the human race, but capitalism being what it is, there was overinvestment and malinvestment, and eventually supply caught up with demand, and everything crashed.

It looks like a tiny blip on a log chart (which is one reason why I hate log charts), but trust me, the crash was no fun. I lived through it and barely held on to my job. This time is no different. This time is never different! Whether it’s railroads, industrials/utilities, the Nifty Fifty, Japan, or any other bubble. The difference is that this one is bigger than all of them, and it looks like it’s not stopping.

. . .

Back when I was at Lehman in 2006, I’d drive out in the country and take pictures of all the housing developments under construction that were completely vacant and then send them out in my Bloomberg messages. Maybe I should take a road trip and take some pictures of all the data centers under construction that will be Spirit Halloween stores in a few years.

I ordinarily don’t like to write rants. I like to write reasoned, thoughtful pieces. But I’m currently on a plane to Minneapolis, and S&P futures, which opened lower (because oil was up), just ripped to new highs… again. It’s truly incredible that the market goes up every day. It will be equally incredible when it goes down every day because that is what it felt like in 2002. A bear market without end.

There's more at the link.

I'm afraid I agree with Mr. Dillian.  Stock market prices have been soaring into the stratosphere year after year, without any sound economic underpinnings.  It's all been a leap of faith.  "The Fed will provide!"  Well, what happens when the Fed can no longer provide?  What happens when the economic consequences of the Iran war begin to bite?  What happens when international market turmoil makes it clear that, despite all the positive punditry from paid opinion writers, the emperor has no clothes, and nothing is or can be guaranteed?

The very real dangers confronting any and all Western economies aren't limited to the Iran war.  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard focuses on China, and points out:

Europe's leaders are waking up to the terrifying danger that China could obliterate much of their industrial base within less than a decade, shattering the old political order and the EU project itself.

The Rhodium Group says the Chinese Communist Party is digging in its heels, doubling down on a strategy of systemic over-investment and over-reliance on exports that cannot be absorbed by the rest of the world, and certainly not a Europe already in semi-slump.

The original "Made in China 2025" plan a decade ago targeted a clutch of specific technologies. Beijing is now expanding this into an "industrial policy of everything": cars, machinery, chemicals, pharma, software, AI, you name it.

China is pursuing this ruthlessly, aiming to capture a larger share of global value added with vertical control of the entire lifecycle.

It is moving towards autarky in its home market while undercutting the West in its own market and in third countries – everywhere and in every product. It devours foreign technology without releasing its own. The Rhodium Group said the foundations of G7 manufacturing are under comprehensive threat.

The "China Shock 2.0" is bigger and more sophisticated than the original China Shock in the 1990s and early 2000s, which flooded the world with cheap goods and wiped out swathes of blue-collar manufacturing in the West.

America bore the brunt of the first shock. The pauperisation of the Midwest Rust Belt set the stage for Donald Trump.

This time China cannot dump its excess capacity on the US market so easily because of trade barriers. The tsunami is instead being displaced into the softer target of Europe. It is hitting with even greater intensity. China's trade surplus hit a record 1pc of global GDP last year. No country has ever reached such an imbalanced position in modern economic history.

Again, more at the link.

My wife and I aren't rich.  Right now, our savings - and some extra debt through a second mortgage - are funding medical care.  Assuming all ends up that ends well, we'll have to rebuild our savings, but I tell you right now, with the stock market as it is, we won't be putting one red cent into it.  I want a store of value that will retain its value in a stock market slump, and for me that means precious metals.  Even before that, I want to make sure we have enough of the essentials to survive a severe, prolonged economic downturn.  If you want a useful list that most of us can use, click over to Lawrence Person's Battleswarm Blog and see his helpful list from last November.  It makes a good start to review our preparations.

Want to invest in something that is likely to offer a reasonable return on investment in the short to medium term?  Look at domestic essentials that may be in short supply during a prolonged downturn, and lay in a supply of them as trading material.  Baby diapers.  Feminine hygiene essentials.  Soap.  Toothpaste.  Basic, essential canned food.  Flashlights and battery powered domestic and camping lanterns.  Think of what your family can't live without, and you've got the start of a useful investment list, right there.

Am I a pessimist?  I don't think so.  I'd rather call myself a realist.  Regular readers will know that I, and many others, have been uneasy about our economy for years, if not decades.  The numbers have been getting worse all that time, and now they're getting worse a lot faster.  Forewarned is forearmed.

I'll leave the last word to an astute observer.  Click the image to be taken to the original post on X.com, and read the more than 600 replies (so far).

Word.

Peter

Who's behind the anti-ICE riots in New Jersey

 

The Twitter user known as DataRepublican, whom we've met in these pages before, has done another masterful job of analyzing the groups and individuals behind the out-of-control anti-ICE riots in New Jersey.  She condensed her findings into a lengthy post on X.  Here's how they begin.

ORG CHART EXPOSED: Which NGOs Are Organizing the Newark Protests, and How

How a six-word Signal message shut down a thousand-person protest.

On the night of June 1, 2026, journalist @NickSortor drove to Delaney Hall expecting what he'd seen for ten straight days: hundreds of protesters surrounding Newark's 1,000-bed ICE detention facility, human chains blocking federal vehicles, pepper balls and tear gas, helmets and gas masks distributed from organized supply stations, catered meals arriving on schedule. He found silence. The crowd — 200-plus the night before — was gone, with tens of thousands of dollars in pre-staged gear abandoned in place.

What happened between Sunday morning and Sunday night was a single message in an encrypted Signal group, as discovered by @bitchuneedsoap. A Cosecha NJ communicator posted a six-line announcement: "Cosecha is NOT mobilizing to Delaney Hall tonight. We are talking to strikers and their families to regroup." No negotiation, no vote, no gradual loss of enthusiasm. Some switch had been flipped off.

The natural question is how a protest of that size can be turned off with one message. The answer is that it was never a protest in the way most people understand the word. It was an operation — assembled, maintained, and disbanded through an organizational structure that looks, once you map it, like a military deployment with a nonprofit org chart.

The structure has four layers. Each answers a different question. Layer 1 decides whether to act. Layer 2 decides how many show up. Layer 3 decides what happens on the ground. Layer 4 keeps the whole thing running across days.

Understanding these layers is understanding how every major protest in America works, because the same people built the template.

There's much more at the link.  Follow it to learn precisely which organizations and individuals are funding and pre-planning all of the anti-Trump and anti-ICE demonstrations and other activities around the country.

We're going to see more and more "spontaneous" demonstrations and unrest as the mid-term elections draw closer.  Their objective will be to give the Democratic Party (and its further-left-wing supporters) a majority in both the House and the Senate, thereby stymie-ing President Trump as he tries to implement the rest of his agenda.  If they succeed in that, and in blaming all the country's problems at his feet, they're confident they can take back the Presidency in 2028.  Given a trifecta of President, House and Senate, they'll lock in their agenda so hard that it'll be impossible to root it out again.

I highly recommend reading all that DataRepublican has to say in the linked article.  I'm sure you'll see the pattern playing out in your own towns, cities and states.  As to what to do about it?  I'm sure you can come up with some useful ideas for yourselves . . .

Peter

EDITED TO ADD:  The news has gone mainstream, with many additional details coming out.  Follow the link for more.