Richard Warn obituary

Hard celling

Dr Richard MacKenzie Warn, who has died aged 50 following a cycling accident, was a world-renowned leader in the field of cancer cell biology. He was educated at De Salle Brothers School, Bournemouth, and St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he was inspired to become a developmental biologist by Sir John Gordon. In the first year of his PhD research, Warn won a scholarship to Palermo, Sicily, where he acquired not only valuable insights into the mechanisms of cell development but also a love for Sicily, and all things Italian, that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

After a brief period of postdoctoral research in Oxford, he was swiftly recruited to the School of Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia, where Warn rapidly built up his own very active research group investigating the role of the cell cytoskeleton in development. Through these investigations, his research inevitably moved to encompass the mechanisms involved in tumour spread.

Richard appreciated at a very early stage the importance of Sir Michael Stoker's work, which at that time involved the mysterious molecule now known as scatter factor or hepatocyte growth factor. He played a leading role in identifying the multifaceted nature of this molecule, which he was fond of describing as 'the Swiss-army knife' of growth factors. He showed its importance in a whole variety of conditions from the spread of mesothelioma to its beneficial effects in promoting the natural healing of wounds.

In his work Richard was ably supported by his wife, Alba. Not only was she essential to much of his research, but she shared his enthusiasm for paleontology, an area where biology comes down to earth and stone. His home and office were decorated with fossils; his favourite area for collecting was, of course, Sicily, which had been his wife's home, and where the family periodically became happily immersed in Italian life and culture.

Warn was active both in the international scientific community and in Norwich, where he had productive collaborations with a number of groups within the UEA school of biology as well as with clinicians from the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital and cell biologists at the John Innes Institute.

Warn is survived by his wife and daughters, Elizabeth and Veronica, his mother and his sister.

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