Twenty-six years ago Professor Charles Swanton was in his first year of medical school when his father Howard was diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a cancer of B-cells, a type of white blood cell responsible for producing antibodies. ‘It was all doom and gloom,’ he remembers. 'We were sure we going to lose our father. That was 1991, but he is still alive and working in the NHS’. With radiation and combination chemotherapy he survived and was cured. ‘It was a real eye-opener about what prior research had already achieved and what people can do when they come together. I thought: ‘Right, I want to be involved in cancer research, I want to do something that makes a difference.’

Since beginning his PhD in 1996 at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a site which would later become the Crick Institute, Professor Swanton has published a staggering 146 papers about cancer evolution and genetics. And it’s when he talks about the subject of his 147th paper, published in the journal Science two weeks ago, that this 44-year old's face really lights up.