ABOVE: MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
Robert Moir, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University who challenged a longstanding hypothesis about the cause of Alzheimer’s disease, died of glioblastoma on December 20. He was 58.
Moir was born on April 2, 1961, and grew up on a farm in Western Australia, according to The New York Times. He didn’t learn to read and write until he was almost 12, but would later earn a PhD at the University of Melbourne, training with renowned Alzheimer’s researcher Colin Masters. “Rob was always a dogged researcher, meaning like a dog with its bone,” Masters told STAT in a 2018 interview. “He never gives up and has never been one to follow the standard line.”
Moir started a postdoc with Mass Gen’s Rudolph Tanzi in 1994, according to STAT, and later joined the faculty. In 2005, Moir and Tanzi discovered a natural antibody against ...
