Professor Alexander Eggermont, Chief Scientific Officer of the Princess Máxima Centre for Paediatric Oncology in Utrecht, Netherlands, agrees. As Law sees it, “this was his commitment to patient benefit”. That the UK eventually found itself with an exceptionally high proportion of cancer patients in clinical trials was in no small part due to McVie. Before McVie took over, “all the clinical research had to compete with laboratory research”, she says. This was valuable, according to his then colleague Kate Law, who later spent a period as Director of Clinical Research for CRC's successor, Cancer Research UK. After almost a decade in the Netherlands as a consultant in oncology at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital and as Clinical Research Director of the country's National Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, he became the Scientific Director of CRC in London and, in 1996, its Director General.Īt the CRC he established a clinical trials committee. From there he moved to Glasgow University's CRC Department of Clinical Oncology, and then to the Netherlands. In 1970, a year after his graduation in medicine, he was offered a Medical Research Council research fellowship on Hodgkin lymphoma at the Edinburgh University Department of Therapeutics, where he worked until 1976. But following unexpected success in a physiology examination, and having realised that medicine offered intellectual satisfactions, McVie threw himself into it. Having barely kept his head above water during preclinical studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK, it required parental pressure to keep him from giving up.

When McVie took on the CRC directorship, he did so on the foundation of a solid previous career in academic cancer medicine that included work on drug discovery in a number of tumours-a career that might not have been predictable in his student days.

The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific.

The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia.

The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology.

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