The title was held by the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and the 18th Century poet Thomas Gray, who was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge.

BBC: Open University Milton Keynes professor given royal award

The team, at the Gray Institute for Radiation Oncology and Biology at Oxford University, were looking for a protein, called gamma-H2AX, which is produced in response to damaged DNA. This tends to be one of the first steps on the road to a cell becoming cancerous.

BBC: One test may 'find many cancers'