Charles Swanton obtained a PhD from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories (now the Francis Crick Institute) in 1998 and completed his medical oncology and Cancer Research UK (CRUK)-funded postdoctoral clinical scientist training in 2008. He was appointed chair in personalized cancer medicine at the UCL Cancer Institute, and consultant thoracic medical oncologist at UCL Hospitals in 2011. In 2016, he was awarded a Napier Professor in Cancer by the Royal Society, and in 2017 he was appointed principal group leader of the Francis Crick Institute. He is co-director of the Cancer Research UK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence, and chief clinician of Cancer Research UK.

It was 1996, over half-way through my PhD in Nic Jones’ laboratory at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund laboratories in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, an extraordinary place to be a scientist. The corridors and labs exuded excitement and discovery and the linoleum floor and wooden lab benches were worn down by the activities of scientists who had revealed fundamental mechanisms of tumor biology over the preceding four decades. The open-minded and collaborative environment, in which a student’s viewpoint was considered equally with a group leader’s, and where a graduate student could walk into a Nobel prizewinner’s office and address the scientist by their first name, was a revelation for a medical student trained in a hierarchical system. I had no idea then what I would end up doing 30 years later, but I did know I was utterly smitten by the excitement of science, discovery and venturing into the unknown.