Every week, it kills more than 3,000 people in Britain. But the news is encouraging: Britain's two largest cancer charities are about to merge, and Sir Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt are about to receive the Nobel Prize.

The Observer, December 2001

The story of Gregor Mendel is one of the most romantic that science has to offer. In 1854, an ambitious abbot at a cold monastery in Brno, Czechoslovakia, started devoting his spare time to the study of pea-breeding. He was interested in inheritance - why some peas came out yellow and some green, why some pods grew longer than others - and his work on hybrids established several important principles of heredity. Though he was largely dismissed at the time as a harebrained obsessive, his work gained him the posthumous reputation as the father of genetics.
His monastery was built in 1322, and is currently something of a tourist attraction. It is also crumbling, and needs large sums to repair it. To this end, Sir Paul Nurse, the director general of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF), has been attending meetings to raise funds and awareness of its plight. He's on a distinguished committee: another member is Jim Watson, the American who won a Nobel Prize for his co- discovery of the molecular structure of DNA.
Two months ago, on Monday 8 October, one of these fundraising meetings at an architect's office in London's Warren Street was interrupted by a receptionist with a request for Nurse to switch on his mobile phone. He left the room and heard a distorted piece of voicemail with a Swedish accent. 'I thought it was telling me I'd won the Nobel Prize,' he remembers, 'but the message was so broken up that I had to play it back three times. At first, I thought it might possibly be a Swedish journalist asking me to comment on the prize. After three plays I'd pieced together enough to think I probably had won, but I couldn't make out the name of the other winners. So I went back to the meeting and said, "I think I've won the Nobel Prize," - which sounds like a stupid thing to say. People, of course, were very pleased, but there was still an element of doubt.'

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