Professor Roland Wolf’s 92-year-old mother was given a front-row seat at Buckingham Palace when her Dundee-based cancer researcher son was presented with his OBE.
The director of the Biomedical Research Institute at Dundee University drove his mother Elisabeth, wife Helga and daughter Andrea straight in to the inner courtyard of the palace, where there was a parking space for them.
His mother lives in a nursing home in Winchester and uses a wheelchair to get around.
Professor Wolf said, “It was just a fantastic day and the people at the palace were fantastic with my mother.
“We picked her up and drove her down to London. The palace has a special parking place for people in wheelchairs in the inner courtyard.
“We were chaperoned through the whole place and given front-row seats in the huge ballroom where the ceremony took place.”
The OBE for services to science was presented by Prince Charles on Thursday and Professor Wolf made the heir to the throne aware of the top team he had back in Dundee.
“He said he knew I was a cancer researcher and asked me if I had a good team,” he said. “I said I had a wonderful team.”
Professor Wolf’s OBE was announced in the 2009 New Year list but he was unable to attend an earlier presentation ceremony.
He came to Dundee in 1992, relocating his entire research team at that time from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund’s Medical Oncology Unit at Western General Hospital, Edinburgh.
Six years later, his discovery that a single gene had a vital role in protecting against cancer helped bring his Dundee unit to international attention.