Michael Baum, formerly professor of surgery at King’s College Hospital, and later professor of surgery at the Royal Marsden and University College London Hospital, is living proof that nature, represented by our inherited genes, is as important as nurture.

Baum may have been brought up in a bookish household and have been lucky enough to have been educated at a good grammar school but he was also blessed with the right genes. One of his ancestors was a celebrated 14th-century scholar. Two of his brothers have become professors. David, a younger brother who has now died, was an inspiring president of the Royal College of Paediatricians and professor of paediatrics at Bristol; and Harold, an elder sibling, was professor of biochemistry at King’s College London and head of the school of life sciences at King’s.

This month Michael Baum, whose expertise in the treatment of breast cancer is recognised worldwide, was presented in Switzerland with the St Gallen lifetime achievement award for the treatment of breast cancer. The St Gallen award is the medical equivalent of winning a Hollywood Oscar. A St Gallen award is presented every other year and the commemorative token is an engraved Rolex rather than a statuette.

It is not by chance that Baum has devoted his surgical career to the treatment of breast cancer. He wasn’t inspired by the desire to win the St Gallen award — or even a splendid ring that he always wears, except when operating — but by the death of his mother from breast cancer in 1974. He was presented with the ring when elected an honorary professor of surgery at the University of Gothenburg. It signifies that he is wedded to the advancement of surgery — and a supportive wife.

In the early 1970s, when his mother died, the standard treatment was a radical mastectomy with extensive radiotherapy. He was appalled by the suffering that his mother endured and the slash-and-burn policy towards breast cancer at the time.

He was one of the firstsurgeons to advocate lumpectomy and breast conservation. Even so, perhaps his greatest claim to fame is that he led the group that was one of the first, if not the first, to understand the importance of Tamoxifen in the treatment of breast cancer. Adjuvant endocrine therapy with Tamoxifen had a dramatic effect on breast-cancer treatment as it significantly prolonged the disease-free interval and overall survival time in most, but not all, postmenopausal women with early-stage breast cancer. In women who are hormone-receptor positive, and therefore likely to respond, it reduces the risk of breast-cancer recurrence by 47 per cent and the risk of death by 26 per cent.

Baum later was one of the leaders in the introduction of the aromatase inhibitors. This group of drugs is not only equal to Tamoxifen in its efficacy but in many instances superior as adjuvant therapy.

The professor was a leading light in the introduction of lumpectomies or partial mastectomy rather than radical mastectomies. As he said recently: “Although the radical mastectomy as treatment for breast cancer is a barbaric procedure it was a great technical exercise in surgery and I was taught to do it with great skill”.

It was a skill that Baum abandoned once the accepted surgery for breast cancer that he advocated had become standard and was breast-conserving rather than radical. It is supported by chemotherapy, including Tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors. Baum is also now leading the field in the type of radiotherapy used as part of therapy for breast cancer.

The efficiency of radiotherapy has already been revolutionised by being more accurately directed, but now, working with Professor Jeffrey Tobias, also from University College London, he is researching into intra-operative radiotherapy.

At the moment women have to attend for a radiotherapy course of seven weeks or so. Not all are as regular attenders as they should be. Baum and Tobias are now using one short radiotherapeutic dose given during the operation. They know that the patient has had an adequate radiotherapy dose even if she is not likely to be a good attender, and she can go away and forget this aspect of her treatment.

Baum, along with his other achievements, is also the man who, having watched his mother die, introduced the concept of the quality of life as a factor in determining treatment. As he received his award he was able to announce that he hoped, and expected, that a greater reward for all his work would be the news that he had just heard. His sister, who had recently been told that she has breast cancer, was having treatment that was likely to be successful and that would also be likely to give her the quality of life he had also wanted for all his patients.

Baum, unlike some clever academics, is a man with a delightful sense of humour. He giggled away as he watched me eating strawberries and cream with a meat pie — which a waiter had mistaken for an apple pie!

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