Duke of Edinburgh becomes fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh
He was given the honour in recognition of his long-standing public service and commitment to creating opportunities for young people.
The Duke is patron of more than 70 charities and organisations across the arts, sport and education, including Northern Ballet, the British Paralympic Association, the National Youth Theatre, and the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland.
He also leads The Duke of Edinburgh's International Award Foundation, where he has served as chairman of trustees since 2015.
The Duke, who was in Scotland during royal week, was inducted by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) president, Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli.
In his address to the RSE Fellows and members of the Young Academy of Scotland on Thursday, the Duke said: 'I thank the Fellows of The Royal Society of Edinburgh for this great honour of inducting me into your society to join your ranks.
'I am proud to join and recognise this institution's rich history and its unwavering commitment to the advancement of knowledge for good, and it has been wonderful to learn about the breadth of this work today.'
The RSE, which has more than 1,800 fellows, supports, and mobilises expertise from across academia, business, and public service for the benefit of Scotland and the wider world.
Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli said: 'His Royal Highness has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to the health and happiness of young people across such a wide range of areas of our society and latterly has taken on the leadership of the Duke of Edinburgh's International Award Foundation.
'Today's celebration continues an unbroken and vital connection between Scotland's National Academy and the Royal Family, one which I am deeply proud to pay tribute to today.'
After his own induction the Duke presented an RSE Royal Medal to Professor Peter Kennedy, Burton Chair of Neurology at the University of Glasgow.
Edward is also Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Infection, Immunity, and Inflammation at the University of Glasgow.
The Royal Medal is the RSE's highest recognition of achievement with only 52 having been presented since their inception in 2000.
Professor Kennedy was awarded the medal for his contribution in distinguishing the major human brain cell types, paving the way to significant diseases and infections, as well as identification of a novel therapy for African trypanosomiasis, known as sleeping sickness.
The Duke of Edinburgh said he is 'delighted' that the society has recognised the work of Prof Kennedy.
He said: 'It is a great honour and privilege to be able to present him a RSE Royal Medal in recognition of his important work.'
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The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
I spent my childhood in and out of hospital. At 19, I finally realised I had a terminal disease
Yvonne Hughes was 19, and attending the funeral of a friend with cystic fibrosis, when she realised: 'Oh shit, I'm going to die of this.' She had met him during shared hospital stays in childhood, and although Hughes had always known she had CF, she had never understood her illness as terminal until that day in 1992, when she stood at the back of the crowded chapel in Glasgow. For three days afterwards, she couldn't stop crying. 'I had a kind of meltdown. That's probably the first time I thought that this thing I had was going to kill me.' Over the next few months, Hughes, who was studying at the University of Glasgow, listened to her mum, dad and older sister chatting during family meals as if she was a ghost at the table. 'I pulled back from them. I deliberately didn't talk or include myself,' she says. 'I wanted them to get used to sitting and chatting without me, so that when I died, they wouldn't notice I wasn't there.' It's a harrowing responsibility for a teenager to take, but self-erasure must have felt like a way to pre-empt death, perhaps to resist it. When she was growing up, cystic fibrosis was considered 'a childhood disease' – because about half of those diagnosed did not survive their teens. A genetic condition in which the body creates thick, sticky mucus, it makes digestion difficult, damages lung function and can lead to respiratory failure. It affects about 160,000 people globally. Now 52, and enjoying what she calls a 'second chance' at life more than 30 years later, Hughes has emerged as a comedian. We are speaking on a video call before her one-hour show, Absolutely Riddled, which she is performing at the Edinburgh fringe, based on her experiences of living with the condition. 'I want to be true to myself and my story,' she says. Why does she think she survived when so many didn't? For most of her childhood, Hughes, who works as a community development worker in Renfrewshire, didn't regard herself as struggling for survival. Her parents didn't sit her down in childhood to explain her illness; she had been diagnosed at six weeks old. But there were hospital visits and tablets and eating often made her vomit. Gradually, she says, she 'put together those two words, cystic and fibrosis, with something that I had'. At school, she kept her illness hidden, taking her medication at home. She was popular; joined the Brownies, then Guides. 'I'm a very level-headed person, but I keep a lot in my mind. I remember when I was younger thinking: 'There's no point telling people about this because everyone is dealing with something. I'm nothing special.' I just got on with it.' Roughly one in every 2,500 people are born with cystic fibrosis in the UK, Australia and the US. Hughes's older sister does not have the illness and the family had no idea what it meant for their lives, or for Hughes herself. Only as she grew older did Hughes build a sense of the precariousness of her life. 'My mum said to me: 'We thought you were going to die, every day. We just didn't know.' It became their new normal to keep me alive.' If she got a chest infection, pleurisy or pneumonia, she would go into hospital, and over the years made friends on the CF ward, a fragile community. When the curtains were closed around a bed for a long time, Hughes and the other children knew not to go past. She reasoned with herself, to allay her fears: 'People were dying around me but I put it down to: 'Maybe they had a really bad infection, maybe they were worse than me.'' In childhood, she developed 'a lot of level-headed thought processes around why those people died'. She found solace in the Cystic Fibrosis Trust magazine, and dreamed of attending one of the advertised camps. 'Luckily, I didn't,' she says, because in the early 1990s, scientists discovered that the camps were a hotbed for the spread of bacteria, present in the lungs and phlegm of children with CF. Many cross-infected each other, some with fatal consequences. Did Hughes struggle to accept that sense of herself, as both vulnerable and a threat? 'Absolutely,' she says. Hospitals implemented a policy of segregation, according to bacteria carried. Hughes has the pseudomonas bacteria, and after her friend's funeral in 1992, she stopped seeing people with cystic fibrosis in case they had different bacteria or bugs that might lead to cross-infection. She has stayed in touch by phone with one old friend. 'We shared growing up in the hospital ward and I do love speaking to him.' But after that funeral, 'I became reckless,' she says. 'I thought: 'Well, life's for living. I'm just going to do what I want.' I didn't care very much for myself. I thought: 'What's the point?' I spiralled.' Her 20s and 30s passed in a blur of 'festivals, partying, travelling when I could, flying by the seat of my pants … ' She had hoped to meet someone, and to have children. 'I thought it would happen. And it never did.' In her 30s, her lung function got so low – 45%, then 36% – that she wouldn't have been able to sustain a pregnancy anyway. 'That was something I tried to grieve. But over the course of a year, I thought: 'I'd rather be alive.' My mantra became: 'I'd rather have a full and short life than a long and unhappy one.' These kinds of philosophical things got me through.' Hughes doesn't have a mantra now – 'other than trying to be funny'. The frequency of her performances range from three times a week to every few weeks, depending on her health needs. But even in her reckless phase, she embodied a stoicism, too. She worked throughout – at a call centre, a radio station, the CF Trust. 'I just had to keep going, pay my bills and mortgage.' Did she ever wonder: 'Why me?' She has had years of spitting out and swallowing mucus – 'constant, constant' – hankies everywhere, non-stop sterilising of stuff, endless medication and pain, unable to take the next breath for granted. As a child, when she went into hospital, there was a faint sense of privilege at being given Lucozade and new slippers, things her sister didn't get. But no one else in her family has the illness. Didn't she feel aggrieved? 'It's a difficult question,' she says. 'I've thought about 'Why me?' in a positive sense – that it was me because I could handle it. Or, I'm glad … because this has made me the way I am.' She has also thought, 'Why at all? Why did cystic fibrosis come into being? Why have this weird disease that just kind of ruins lives?' While Hughes survived childhood by reminding herself that she wasn't special, the differences between her life and others' sharpened as she entered her 40s. She became an aunt, and bore close witness to her peers' life transitions while she kept on being 'just Yvonne – the one that never reached any potential'. 'I couldn't have a career because I would always get ill. I never moved social class. I always remained working class.' Her dad was a welder, her mother a GP receptionist. 'Everything I did, I did myself. But it was day by day, week by week. There was never a plan. I always felt I could never get ahead of myself.' In 2018, aged 45, with deteriorating health, Hughes took redundancy from her job as public affairs officer at the CF Trust. Eating was difficult. Her weight hovered around 7 stone. She braced herself for the possibility of a lung transplant, but as her lung capacity dropped to 30%, she was deemed too ill for the waiting list. 'I was like: 'OK, that door's closed. At this point, there isn't anything else on the horizon to keep me alive.'' She completed an end-of-life form, and met the palliative care team. She thought: 'I'll see my days out with my parents, make memories and know I did well to get to 48.' Then, in 2020, the UK government granted access to a new drug, Kaftrio. Hughes had read about its worldwide trials. When the delivery driver knocked on the door, she told him: 'You're going to save my life.' At that point, her lung function was down to 26%. Within an hour or two of the first tablet, she started coughing. 'They call it the purge,' she says. There was so much mucus – dark, watery and horribly fascinating – she captured it in a cup, put a lid on it, and stowed it in a drawer in her bedroom. 'I kept that cup for a long time,' she says. Maybe she already knew it was a relic. The Kaftrio turned Hughes's life 'a whole 180, literally overnight'. There are side-effects – insomnia, weight gain, which have brought other challenges – but before long, she says, 'I could breathe again without coughing. I went back to work within the year. I could run, I could dance, I could speak, I could stand up straight and cook. I used to always be bent over, catching my breath. And then all of a sudden that was gone. It was a miracle.' Energised, she decided to enrol in an evening course. Acrylic painting, maybe, or playing the keyboard? But at the University of Strathclyde's Centre for Lifelong Learning, it was the flyer for comedy that caught her eye. 'I had always loved going to gigs. Something clicked and I enrolled.' She performed a five-minute set for the course finale – and immediately wanted to do it again. 'I started applying for clubs, Monkey Barrel and the Stand Comedy Club [both in Edinburgh]. I got Red Raw [the Stand's beginners' slot] and went from there. I want to change my life,' she says, 'and I am doing comedy to see if I can change my life.' Nearly four years ago, Hughes met her partner, Alan, online. Having spent a lifetime feeling unable 'to rely on a future', she has had to learn to picture one – and to override her old instinct to absent herself to mitigate later losses. Sometimes, this means catching herself in the act of 'pulling back' from Alan, and letting the pleasure she takes in his company teach her to quiet her mind. Life now is so different, it requires a conscious effort to remember how hard it was from one moment to the next. 'I used to breathe so shallowly that I had to take a – haa! – sharp intake of breath – to feel I was breathing,' she says. The sound punctuated even the simplest actions – after getting into a car, for instance, after reaching for her seatbelt, after pulling it across her, after fastening it. 'Now I can get in the car, pull the seatbelt over and go. I can walk and talk. I can laugh without wetting myself or going into a convulsion of coughing, pulling a muscle or breaking a rib,' she says. 'It is a horrible, horrible disease. It suffocates you. It takes every inch of your breath away. And now it is something I can live with and not die from. I'll probably live to get my pension.' Comedy has brought 'fun, joy and laughter' back into Hughes's life. But it has also given her something that nothing else has. 'I had never found anything for me in my life. I'd never married. I had no children. So I had no community. Nothing,' she says. 'There were people getting their careers and their lives sorted. Comedy was the one thing that was for me. And it still is. Just for me.' Yvonne Hughes: Absolutely Riddled is at Snug at Gilded Balloon Patter House, Edinburgh, until 15 August
The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
Colonial ideas of beauty: how skin lightening products are linked to cancer in black African women
Two months after first going to hospital, a 65-year-old woman was dead – and her doctors are blaming the cosmetic creams she used on her face and body for decades. The anonymous patient, from Togo, is one of a string of recent cases reported in medical journals of cancers in black African women linked to skin-lightening creams and lotions, prompting dermatologists to call for better regulation. The melanin found in darker skin typically offers some protection against the sun damage which can cause cancers. 'Patients with black skin have a natural SPF of about 15, just by having pigmented skin,' says Prof Ncoza Dlova, head of dermatology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa,. 'If they remove that melanin [with skin lightening creams], they're actually removing the natural protection.' Estimates of skin lightening product use in African countries range from 25% to 80% of women. Lighter skin is often seen as more desirable, in a trend with complex drivers including values imported in the colonial era. Dlova and colleagues are writing up a paper citing more than 55 cancer cases, from countries including Mali and Senegal. 'If we are getting self-induced skin cancer, then that's a red flag and worrying,' says Dlova. 'We have to do something about it.' The market for skin lightening product is growing, with analysts predicting that the current market size of US$10.7bn (£8bn) will reach US$18.1bn by 2033. There are even reports of the products being used on babies and young children. For Dlova, they are 'a health hazard that needs to be addressed'. Almost every day, she says, her clinic in Durban will see someone with a skin problem linked to lightening products. 'Of course, not all of them are coming with skin cancer … They come in with fungal infections that are resistant to the common treatment that we normally use. They present with pimples, referred to as steroid-induced acne, as well as rosacea. Some present with permanent stretch marks; all these complications are extremely common.' The Togo patient had three large, painful, cancerous tumours on her neck, which she had tried to treat with antibiotics, antiseptics and traditional herbal poultices with no success before going to hospital. One of the tumours was removed, but the others were too close to blood vessels and she could not afford the recommended chemotherapy. She told her doctors she had used creams that included topical hydroquinone and highly potent corticosteroids for about 30 years. In another series of eight cancers, reported in Senegal, the women had used similar products for about 20 years on average. Two of those patients died. Hydroquinone as a skin lightener has been banned in South Africa since 1990, and other African countries including Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ghana followed suit. Those bans were prompted by serious concerns about an irreversible form of skin damage called ochronosis. But regulation is often weak, and the products are reportedly still available from street vendors and cosmetic shops. The use of steroids in skin lighteners is a newer phenomenon. Topical steroids are used in dermatology to treat inflammatory skin conditions such as eczema, but a side-effect is that they make skin lighter, a fact exploited for their use in cosmetics. If the two problematic ingredients are used together they can have a 'synergistic effect', Dlova says. The International League of Dermatological Societies (ILDS) has published an alert warning about the dangers of misuse of potent topical steroids, and is calling for governments to better regulate the products. The problem goes beyond Africa, says the ILDS president Prof Henry Lim, with the problem first raised by its members in India. After South Africa's hydroquinone ban, there was a lull in how frequently dermatologists encountered complications of skin bleaching, Dlova says 'but again, in the last 10 years there was just a sudden eruption of the complications of skin bleaching again. Skin cancer per se had not been described before, it's only been described recently. So obviously, things have got worse – because from irreversible pigmentation [ochronosis] to skin cancer, those are really red flags implying that we need to do something about it.' While the desire for lighter skin is not new, Dlova suspects the rise of social media over the past decade has led to increased use, pointing to smartphone filters that make skin look smoother and lighter. Tackling the issue will require action from many sectors – not only regulatory agencies. 'Marketing, social media and media all have a role to play – fashion, celebrities and all of that. If they use black models who are lighter in skin colour, the message they are conveying is that you are prettier, you can be a model, you are more attractive if you are lighter. So we need to ensure that the advertisements include diverse skin colours when they are choosing their models,' says Dlova. She also wants to see skin health education in preschools to teach children to be proud of their natural skin, and to get across the message of using sunscreen. Some black patients will have skin challenges including pigmentation disorders, she says, which may require creams with lightening ingredients. But these should be used under medical supervision. Part of the ILDS advocacy will be asking pharmaceutical companies to make those prescription products more affordable, so that people do not need to turn to cheaper off-the-shelf products that may be dangerous.
Daily Mirror
4 days ago
- Daily Mirror
Breakthrough in breast cancer research could stop the disease from spreading
The discovery offers new hope in the fight against breast cancer, as it could detect and stop the spread of the disease before it becomes incurable Scientists have achieved a significant breakthrough in the battle against breast cancer by dismantling the very components that enable the deadly disease to metastasise. Researchers have discovered that cancer alters the metabolism of certain immune cells, causing them to release a metabolite known as uracil, which aids in constructing a 'scaffold' within distant organs, facilitating the growth of secondary tumours. By inhibiting the enzyme uridine phosphorylase-1 (UPP1), responsible for producing uracil, scientists were able to prevent this 'scaffold' from forming in mice and rejuvenated the immune system's capacity to eliminate secondary cancer cells, thereby thwarting metastasis. This groundbreaking work was carried out in the laboratories of Professor Jim Norman and Professor Karen Blyth at the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute and the University of Glasgow. This discovery paves the way for potentially potent new methods to combat cancer – identifying uracil in the bloodstream could signal early indications of cancer metastasis, while impeding UPP1 with medication could halt its progression before it even begins. The study's lead author, Dr Cassie Clarke, from the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute and University of Glasgow, said: "This study represents a major shift in how we think about preventing the spread of breast cancer. By targeting these metabolic changes as early as possible we could stop the cancer progressing and save lives." Published in Embo Reports, the research indicates that crucial metabolic alterations take place prior to the dissemination of cancer, presenting an essential opportunity for intervention. Identifying these alterations at an early stage could enable treatments to prevent cancer cells from migrating throughout the body and establishing tumours in different locations. Dr Catherine Elliott, Cancer Research UK's director of research, explained: "Discoveries in cancer research have made huge strides in making breast cancer a far more treatable disease than ever before. However, metastasis - when cancer spreads - is a major factor in breast cancer becoming harder to treat especially if the cancer returns months or even many years later. "This discovery gives us new hope for detecting and stopping metastasis early and ensuring people have many more years with their families and loved ones." With approximately 56,800 people receiving a breast cancer diagnosis in the United Kingdom annually and roughly 11,300 people dying from it each year, discovering innovative approaches to combat it remains crucial. Due to research breakthroughs, breast cancer has evolved into a significantly more manageable illness, yet when it metastasises to different parts of the body, effective control becomes increasingly challenging. Comprehending the mechanisms behind breast cancer's spread is essential to preventing the disease from becoming uncontrollable with existing treatments. The research team is now delving deeper into precisely how UPP1 alters immune cell behaviour, examining the function of immune cell metabolism in early breast cancer development, and evaluating the potential of medications that inhibit immune cell metabolism to prevent cancer onset. Simon Vincent, the chief scientific officer at Breast Cancer Now, said: "This is an exciting piece of joint research that expands our understanding of how secondary breast cancer develops. "The researchers discovered that high levels of a protein called UPP1 may make some cancers, including breast cancer, more likely to spread to other parts of the body, where the disease becomes incurable. "In mice, targeting the UPP1 protein before secondary breast cancer developed led to fewer secondary breast tumours and a boosted immune response in the lungs. "Now we need more research to see if this new insight can be turned into new drugs that stop secondary breast cancer, and potentially other secondary cancers, in their tracks. With around 61,000 people living with secondary breast cancer in the UK, research like this is vital."
