This year marks the 100th birthday of the
Medical Research Council (MRC), the publicly funded research council with a mission to improve health through medical research.
As part of the centenary celebrations, the MRC has been running
a poll asking people to choose the medical advance with the greatest impact on health over the past 100 years, and to imagine what important medical discoveries we can expect over the next 100 years. The poll is open to the public, but they have also collected the views of various celebrities, politicians and high-profile scientists and their answers are listed on the website.
Reading down the responses, I spotted one from the Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts MP, who proposed the identification of a link between smoking and lung cancer:
“The discovery of a link between smoking and lung cancer particularly stands out. It significantly influenced policy and behaviour, prevented millions of unnecessary deaths and culminated in a ban on smoking in enclosed places that will improve our overall health and save the country billions of pounds.”
Here at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, we can claim a slice of credit for that discovery. Our role begins in the 1930s with Professor Sir Ernest Kennaway who was the Director of The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) - or The Cancer Hospital Research Institute as we were then called. After a huge increase in the number of cases of lung cancer in the 1920s and 30s, Prof Kennaway began a project examining death certificates to look for any correlation between the incidence of lung and larynx cancer and people’s profession. He was looking for patterns based on the substances that people came into contact with at work, following on from his previous work looking at the carcinogenic properties of coal tars. In
his study, not only did he confirm that those who came into contact with coal gas and tar in their work had increased incidence of lung cancer, he found that tobacco manufacturers and tobacconists had high incidence of lung cancers as well.
Over the next decade, other studies drew similar conclusions on a possible link between smoking and lung cancer, and so the MRC decided to draw several strands of research in the field together. It organised two parallel research strands, with a team led by Professor Bradford Hill carrying out large epidemiological studies to investigate a link between smoking and lung cancer, and a team led by Professor Kennaway investigating the carcinogens (cancer-causing agents) in cigarette smoke and other air pollutants. The epidemiological strand of the project led to the
landmark publication by Professor Hill and Sir Richard Doll of the MRC Statistical Research Unit in 1950, in which they confirmed the link between smoking and lung cancer.
As smoking is the single greatest cancer risk factor and cause of preventable disease in the UK, this discovery and the work that led up to it was certainly important. It is largely to combat these effects that the ICR and other institutions across London
set up the London Long Cancer Alliance this week.
But is it the discovery that’s had the biggest impact in the last 100 years? Here at the ICR there are lots of
achievements that the organisation is proud of, and I can’t think of many discoveries that have had greater impact than our revelation that the basic cause of cancer is damage to DNA.
In the 1950s and 60s ICR scientists Professor Peter Brookes and Professor Philip Lawley discovered that carcinogens react with and damage DNA, laying the foundations for the idea that cancer is a genetic disease, and overturning the prevailing view at the time that proteins were the cellular targets for carcinogens.
Professors Brookes and Lawley went on to describe the mechanisms in which carcinogens react with DNA, greatly increasing our understanding of mutations in cancer. These findings paved the way for most of the major discoveries in cancer research since then: discovering that cancer arises from mutations in genes that control cell growth or DNA repair, and identifying specific oncogenes, tumour suppressors, drug targets and treatments.
Our last blog post describes the impact of the Human Genome Project on cancer research, explaining how it is leading us to far more targeted and effective chemotherapeutics. None of these advances would have been possible without that initial discovery that the basic cause of cancer is damage to DNA.
So for me, these discoveries are both great examples of the enormous impact of medical research and I’ll be talking about them when I fill in the MRC poll. What do you think? The MRC poll is still open and you can have a say
here. The nation’s favourite medical innovation will be announced at a special MRC Centenary Celebration at Cheltenham Science Festival on Saturday 8th June. Let’s hope for more of the same in the century to come.
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