PETER O’Neill is radiating pride, after his decades of work trying to cure cancer won him an international award.

The Oxford University researcher has dedicated his career to working out how radiation causes tumours by mutating DNA, and how it can be used to kill the same tumours.

The deputy director of Oxford Institute for Radiation Oncology travelled to Las Vegas with his wifeCarol to pick up his award.

The plaque presented to him by the North American Radiation Research Society says: “In recognition of an outstanding member of the radiation research community whose history of significant contributes to radiation research”.

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Dr O’Neill, 66, a fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, who lives in Grove, said: “One of the things I love most is training students and seeing how they progress.

“I always say to them, when there are ups and downs, it is like any other job – 90 per cent is routine.

“It’s about those few times when you find something and say ‘look at that!’, then you spend the next two years trying to prove it. It’s that discovery, that excitement, and trying to train people for the future.”

Dr O’Neill works at the university’s Old Road Campus, opposite the Churchill Hospital, using a particle accelerator to fire radiation at human cells.

Born and raised in Coventry, where he and Carol met as teenagers, Dr O’Neill studied Chemistry at Leeds University.

After four years working at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, accompanied by his wife, he returned to the UK.

But it was his next job at Harwell that focused his attention on cancer.

Funded by the Medical Research Council, he was put in charge of a team at the radiobiology unit modelling DNA damage from nuclear power plants or bombs.

They showed that different types of radiation from plutonium or cobalt caused unique “clusters” of damage in genes.

In 2008, he was recruited by Oxford University to help study how the same radiation could be used to kill tumours.

His team is now trying to work out how they can stop cancer cells repairing themselves following radio-therapy.

But Dr O’Neill said the dream of a single “cure for cancer” will never be realised.

The grandfather-of-two added: “I’m old enough to realise there are very different cancers and we will need a lot of different approaches to tackle them.

“People are looking at individual, personalised treatments.”

He said the award was the “icing on the cake” of his 40-year career, and he was glad his field had been recognised.

Mrs O’Neill, 63, a retired teaching assistant at Millbrook School, Grove, said: “He is such a modest man, but so passionate about his young students.

“He deserved some recognition.”

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