Popped over to the Oval a few hundred yards down the road, to do an auction for Cancer Research UK. This was truly a duty call, because they gave my wife's hospital, Addenbrooke's, £20m for their new research centre, and are currently funding the scientists working at the centre £13m a year. There was a Q&A session after dinner with the Australian cricketers Ian Harvey and Stuart Law and our Twenty20 wicket keeper James Foster - universally acknowledged as the best wicket keeper in England. But as he modestly pointed out, while Matt Prior retains a test average of around 50, it's hard to displace him. He also reminded us that he's 29 years old and not the person the selectors will be considering in the long term. After the function, I strolled home with Mike Hollingsworth, one of the charity's executives, who told me that Cancer Research last year raised £400m - every penny needed because 600 people a day are told they have cancer. That's the bad news. The good news is that while in the 1980s 50% of people diagnosed with cancer died within a year, now they can be expected to survive another decade. What an amazing achievement. The pages of our newspapers are filled with the death of Michael Jackson, but how many people could name the man who founded the Genome project and won the Nobel prize? Forgive me for thinking that Sir John Sulston's achievement is quite the equal of Michael Jackson's.
3 Comments:
dear mr archer
surprising to see that you can be so sentimental and ignore the obvious
mj was in the business of entertainment, in the limelight.
for that matter more people remember or recall sir don bradman
compared to any of the nobel lauretes
even in nobel you must admit
the winners of literature and peace prize
for popularity and politics respectively
are far more easily recalled than their chemistry or physics counterparts
Jeffrey
Sir John's achievement is not the equal of Michael Jackson's. It far, far, far, exceeds it!
The Genome project, will probably form the basis of the effective "cure" of many of today's most awful and feared diseases.
It's a great pity that so many people do not, until it's too late, for either them or their family members, recognise what medical (and other) research scientists and those who enable them, are doing for us all.
Everyone should consider contributing more to the (frankly under-paid) researchers who devote their lives to helping us all. Their achievemnts are, already, truly fabulous.
The staff of Cancer Research UK and it's fellow research centres world-wide and indeed, other disease research centres, deserve nothing less than 100% support from us all.
Pop Stars of whatever persuasion do not, in my mind, enter the equation!
Not the equal, Charlie"s right. But good for you to even possibly suggest there's more important people than mj. Not a popular thought, but that is where society is at - unfortunately.
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