A merger of the biggest cancer research funding bodies in the UK would turn back the clock. Nearly a hundred years ago, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and the Cancer Research Campaign were one organisation.

The Imperial Cancer Research Fund was set up in 1902 by the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons, who were concerned about the level of human suffering caused by cancer.

An advertisement was placed in the Times on April 19 1902, appealing for donations to the tune of £100,000 to back the research. It said: "investigations into such an obscure disease as cancer will, in all probability, as in the case of tuberculosis, extend over a considerable number of years".

Two years later Edward VII granted the charity, then known as the Cancer Research Fund, the right to use the prefix Imperial. In 1939 it gained a royal charter to promote "investigations into all matters connected with or bearing on the causes, prevention, treatment and cure of cancer".

But a split occurred among the clinicians, with some feeling that the pace of progress in cancer research was much too slow.

The break came in 1923. The new group, clearly intent on occupying the same ground and raiding the wallets of the same donors, called itself the British Empire Cancer Research Campaign and launched with an appeal in the Times for a modest £5,000.

The money, once raised, was split between the Middlesex hospital research laboratories and the researchers department at the Cancer hospital, now the Royal Marsden, in London. Both grants of £2,500 were for buying radium.

The Cancer Research Campaign has shed its claims to represent the empire, though the ICRF is still saddled with a reference it would like to lose if a full merger went ahead.