The township of 12 people
which sells four million
cans of beer a year
Scotland
in the
heat
John Cameron
In December 1971, Richard Nixon declared war on cancer which effectively meant the US was going to stand the problem up against a wall and throw money at it.
So four decades later, where are we at? Well, the National Cancer Institute reports more than 150 forms of cancer from the ‘survivable’ testicular to the ‘fatal’ pancreatic.
Wondrous cancer therapies are reported several times a year in the tabloid press only to flame out leaving those fearsome ‘heavies’: chemotherapy, radiation and the knife. The first two have horrific side effects and weaken the immune system while ‘heroic’ surgery causes hideous mutilation and all three often make little difference.
On the rare occasions I meet with my three medical brothers, I send eyes to the ceiling by asking yet again why the immune system is not harnessed. The current situation is re-explained to me with the ‘moron in the room’ overtones I use when talking about global warming or wind-farms to an enthusiastic non-scientist.
Once again they emphasise how crafty cancer can be, changing the biological pathways by which cells proliferate so that even targeted molecular therapies soon stop working. Of course vaccines could match the cancer cells move for move but none have really worked so far and if the antigen targeted is also on healthy cells all hell breaks loose.
My father’s cousin James Cameron ended his autobiography ‘Point of Departure’ with the words: ‘Hope subsides but curiosity remains’. Perhaps that is the sensible attitude to the notion of cancer vaccines yet, in spite of the many years of failure, all my scientific instincts point in that direction.
This year the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first-ever tumour vaccine, Provenge, to treat prostate cancer, and there are scores of other vaccines in the pipeline. One that caught my eye was the University of Pennsylvania’s vaccine against chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) which has brought about remissions of over a year. The possibility that it can be tweaked to attack lung cancer, ovarian cancer, myeloma, and melanoma certainly aroused interest among America’s leading oncologists.
When I was a child TB sanatoria littered the land and the rich went off to die in St Moritz but suddenly it was all over – and one day it will be ‘all over’ for cancer.
Some of the
nationalists need
to get out more
Jill Stephenson
I am currently surrounded by the English. This is mitigated only by the presence of a Scottish friend and a few Australians. Not that there is so much to mitigate – many of the English are very good company and most are gently good-natured.
The subject of Scottish independence has come up in conversation. They are aware of Alex Salmond’s high profile and somewhat bemused by his politics. Why do we want to break up the union? I don’t have much of an answer beyond a deep-seated sense of grievance on the part of some rather vocal Scots. This is most manifest among those who accuse people opposed to separation (a word embargoed by the SNP as, I assume, being thought to be pejorative) of thinking that Scotland is ‘too wee, too poor and too stupid’ to run its own affairs. One could add to that ‘too mean-spirited’ in the case of a number of SNP supporters.
Several of the English here have Scottish connections – a mother or mother-in-law, time spent at school in Glasgow, that sort of thing. Then there is the man with the posh accent who claims to be Scottish and says that he is a landowner in Scotland. He is a bit less agreeable than many of the English, some of whom sound exactly as he does. But my overriding impression of the people with whom I am sharing this small ship for two weeks is of people who are interested in one’s provenance and one’s views. We speak the same language, are passionate about the same things (opera, in the case of two Englishmen here and myself) and laugh at the same absurdities.
One Englishman vouchsafed to me his affection for both Rikki Fulton and Chic Murray. These travelling companions are not aliens who have shackled us and from whose allegedly oppressive grasp we need to be free. Some of the nats need to get out more.
I should declare an interest. I was born in Scotland and have lived here for pretty much all of my life. But I married an Englishman. Except that he never admitted to being an Englishman – ‘I’m a Yorkshireman’, is what he would say by way of identification. He spent so long in Scotland that a Yorkshire aunt upbraided him for speaking with a Scottish accent (which he certainly did not). And, speaking of who comes from where, am I wrong in thinking that Canon Kenyon Wright, who has rather a lot to say about Scottish governance, is domiciled in England, and therefore will not have a vote in the referendum? Or was it a different Kenyon Wright whom I heard some time ago on radio, perhaps on ‘Any Answers’, talking about this very issue from somewhere in England?
Does anyone seriously imagine that the small matter of a referendum
will stop people all over the world from describing us all in these islands
as ‘English’?
The very pleasant people whom I have met here, from York, Liverpool, Southampton, Cumbria and Warwick, among other places, feel a similar irritation with the group of ‘frightfully haw-haw’ people (as my friend calls them) here as I do. Four of us were closeted with seven of them (a critical mass) in a minibus one day, and the air of effortless superiority was well in evidence. Britain may or may not rule the waves, but these people, with their braying voices, certainly rule the airwaves. Yet I have to admit that from time to time one or other of them says something that is (unintentionally) very funny. They mostly don’t want to associate with people like us (and I don’t mean Scots – just anyone who doesn’t sound like them), any more than we want to associate with them. Social segregation cuts both ways.
It’s true that there is quite a bit of talk about ‘back in England’, and so on. It jars a little, but then for them it is accurate – England is where they come from. The person who has used the word ‘English’ (meaning British) most in my hearing is a lecturer who is an anthropologist. She is American. But then she believes that a socialist revolution was attempted, and crushed, in 19th-century ‘England’. I saw a contributor to a Scotsman online discussion forum (where the nats are generally out in strident force) saying that it would be a great relief, when Scotland is independent, not to have people describing him/her as ‘English’, to which I can only respond ‘dream on’. Does anyone seriously imagine that the small matter of a referendum will stop people all over the world from describing us all in these islands as ‘English’?
At one of our stops we met a Canadian couple from Ottawa who were keen to tell us what an awful business the referendum(s) in Quebec had been, and what a relief it was that all that was now over. Don’t do it, was their message. For them, the Québécois had wanted everything to be decided on their terms and in their favour, regardless of what other Canadians wanted. Sound familiar?
Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh
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