Nature’s power
The natural world has helped Cancer Research UK make some incredible discoveries, and your pledge will keep the breakthroughs coming
Ordinary people can ensure an extraordinary legacy by pledging to leave a gift in their Will to Cancer Research UK. Gifts in Wills fund more than a third of the charity’s research, and when you delve a little deeper into what that research actually entails, you realise just what vital, innovative work it is. These two examples in particular owe a great debt to the natural world, and could have a lasting effect on the way cancer is treated.
THE ADD-ASPIRIN TRIAL
The Add-Aspirin trial is testing whether a daily dose of aspirin might help prevent cancer from returning, but also develop new ways to predict which patients are most likely to benefit from this treatment. Aspirin, or acetylsalicylic acid, was purified from willow bark in the mid-1800s. It has fallen in and out of favour since, but Cancer Research UK is investigating whether aspirin could provide a cheap and easy way to help more people survive cancer.
But it’s not without its risks – aspirin can sometimes cause strokes, bleeding or ulcers. To test the reported benefits against these risks, Cancer Research UK is collaborating with the government-funded National Institute for Health Research in the UK and clinical trial centres in India to run a large-scale 12-year trial, examining aspirin’s effects in thousands of patients with breast, bowel, prostate, stomach or oesophageal cancer.
Gifts in Wills fund more than a third of trials just like this, and the Add-Aspirin trial could have a huge impact in dramatically reducing the cost of many different cancer treatments.
THE PROGRESS CONTINUES
Another piece of nature-inspired innovation that gifts in Wills have helped fund is the use of bark from the Pacific yew tree to formulate the chemotherapy drug paclitxel. The drug is commonly used to prevent the growth and division of cancer cells for many different types of cancer.
Cancer Research UK is currently running trials using paclitxel, including one testing how the level of dosage affects germ cell tumours in men and teenage boys, and another testing combinations of chemotherapy drugs when treating advanced ovarian cancer. The link between gifts in Wills and these life-saving trials couldn’t be clearer – without the generous funding from these gifts, Cancer Research UK wouldn’t be able to continue making breakthroughs and help more people survive cancer.
Stoke, before taking in the bigger village of Chew Magna via a long and circuitous 5km route. This wonderful walk, which I had completed on just a couple of occasions in the six years prior to owning Bramble, takes us through fields and woods, around badger setts and over streams. By walking this route on at least a biweekly basis, in all seasons and in all weathers, I’ve come to know its twists and turns with a level of intimacy I’d only ever previously achieved with the back of my own hand.
BRAMBLE’S DISCOVERIES
Many of the distinctive trees along the walk have become waymarkers and even old friends, but it wasn’t until last spring when Bramble cocked his leg to relieve himself against one such specimen that I suddenly realised I was unsure as to its identity. Returning with my tree identification book the following day, I was thrilled to discover that Bramble had urinated over a mature wych elm. A common species 50 years ago, virtually all our elms have since been wiped out by the scourge of Dutch elm disease, so good-sized trees are now considered to be as rare as hen’s teeth. I would also like to think that no one else in the world knows about the precise location of this tree, and while it might not actually be growing in our garden, it is to all intents and purposes mine – you hear me!
Bramble has also added a different dimension to our walks in a way I would never have imagined before: through the power of his nose. His sense of smell is so finely tuned that any fresh activity at our local badger sett, for example, be it through a spring clean or a fresh deposit in one of the latrines, will immediately be picked up by the sniffing machine by my side. These meline updates would simply have passed me by without Bramble’s olfactory diligence, and have helped me to gain both a better insight and deeper understanding into the day-today business of surely one of the most clandestine and misunderstood of all our mammals.
I do hope my family won’t be offended when I say that taking the dog out can often be the highlight of my day. In my biased opinion, Bramble gets an A+ for temperament, and our rambles together represent a time for quiet companionship, giving me the opportunity to strategise, to dream, or even to switch off. However, as we don’t have exclusive use of the Chew Valley, not all our walks are executed in such splendid isolation, so these Zen moments are frequently interspersed with short bursts of intense social interaction, as Bramble bounds over to greet Cookie, Jack, Puff, Shelby, Jessie, Kiba, Mabel or Hugo with the gleeful enthusiasm of a grown-up puppy.
“Many of the distinctive trees along this walk have become old friends”