King Charles received a personal reminder of his late mother during a visit to the Francis Crick Institute in London on Wednesday to celebrate its tenth anniversary.
The King was presented with a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II opening the institute in King’s Cross, central London, 10 years earlier.
The UK’s flagship biomedical research organisation is the largest facility of its kind housed under one roof in Europe. According to The Independent, hundreds of scientists and staff paused their work and watched from its steel and glass balconies as Charles learned about a decade of scientific discoveries.
During a laboratory tour, the King was invited to use a joystick to view pollutant particles through a microscope. He politely declined with a light-hearted remark: “No you do it, it will go haywire if I do it.”
Established in 2015, the Francis Crick Institute brings together 2,000 scientists and staff to investigate the biological processes behind health and disease. Their work explores how illnesses develop and how conditions such as cancer and heart disease can be prevented, diagnosed and treated.
The visit followed Charles’s recent return from a nine-day tour of the Caribbean, during which Queen Camilla joined him.
