TODAY the Evening Press joins forces with Yorkshire Cancer Research to launch a Free Will Scheme which aims to boost the charity's vital work in the region.

In conjunction with eight firms of solicitors in York and the surrounding area, the charity is offering 500 residents the opportunity to have a will drawn up free of charge.

Participants in the scheme will be offered the opportunity - but will be under no obligation - to make provision for Yorkshire Cancer Research in their will.

It is hoped that by leaving money to the charity, which was founded in 1925, its future will be secured and many more years of Yorkshire-based research can be funded.

York itself is home to two research units at the University of York, where world-class research takes place into prostate cancer under Professor Norman Maitland and into cervical cancer under Professor Jo Milner.

Professor Maitland's pioneering research into prostate cancer has resulted in York being chosen as the co-ordination centre for the European-wide study of gene therapy against prostate cancer.

The 50-year-old scientist has given his full backing to the Free Will Scheme.

He said: "With Yorkshire Cancer Research the money you give is spent in Yorkshire on good science - and that's what will bring a cure for cancer.

"Yorkshire Cancer Research is phenomenally efficient. The money you give doesn't all go on advertising, a high proportion of it goes to research.

"And clearly we think what we are doing here is first-class. Last year we had an assessment by Yorkshire Cancer Research, and also by the Government, and they put together a panel of international experts.

"They assessed what we had done and they awarded us the Centre of Excellence grant. So people can at least rest assured that work they are doing is of a very high standard."

Professor Maitland said his team did not use animal testing in its work, working instead with human prostate cancer cells, collected from patients who were keen to help with research.

This enabled the team to study prostate cancer in a special way, developing treatments that were more effective and had fewer side-effects.

Professor Maitland said: "We are trying to target this incurable cancer. We may not cure someone, but we may allow him to live with his cancer without all the side-effects that you would get from other treatments."

Professor Maitland's team of six students, seven scientists and six technicians, receives more than £300,000 a year from Yorkshire Cancer Research and funding from the Government worth half as much again - an amount he says is necessary to achieve such high standards.

He said: "If the money stops, if the experts disappear to other laboratories then all these ideas would gradually fade away. You always think of science as being a man in a lab making a discovery, but it's not, it's teamwork. And without this team we would achieve a lot less."

Updated: 08:24 Monday, April 07, 2003