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Will you leave a sight-saving legacy like Joan? By leaving a gift in your Will, you’ll be ensuring that there will always be support for people living with sight loss, long into the future. Crucially, you’ll be funding groundbreaking research until there is a cure for macular disease. For every person diagnosed.

There are many reasons why you might be considering a gift in your Will to the Macular Society.

Tell us about your career as a retinal specialist:

“I’ve been a consultant ophthalmologist for 22 years, and I’m the Director of the Clinical Eye Research Centre in Liverpool. I trained in Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds as an ophthalmologist, but I made it clear that I wanted not only to bring the clinical element to my profession, but the research side too. So I’ve always been actively involved in research, which is also at the heart of our profession.

I was diagnosed in my early forties, about 25 years ago.

Q8 - Accelerating research is going to cost a lot of money, isn’t it? Where will that come from?

Answer: Yes, research is expensive, but we are wholeheartedly committed to strengthening and expanding our involvement in the years to come. Money will come from a variety of places but it’s fair to say that we will get there quicker with the help of our donors and members, and especially those kind people who leave a donation to research in their Will. It is such a generous and significant thing for someone to do. Every donor is important to us, and I would like to thank everyone who has ever given and anyone thinking about doing so. It is safe to say that all our colleagues at the Macular Society feel the same and we are grateful to everyone joining us in the fight to Beat Macular Disease.

My experience of macular disease began with my mother. She was born in 1899 and was in her seventies when she began having vision problems. One day she woke up blind in one eye, and maybe a few days or weeks later, she woke up blind in the other. It was pretty sudden.  

At the time – it was the 1970s – nobody said it was macular disease because I don’t think they knew for certain. But it was. And of course there wasn’t any treatment in those days. 

A gift in your Will would fund world-class research to find a cure for macular disease. In the past 30 years, we’ve funded over £6 million of research: from researchers at the top of their game to postgraduates – the leading scientists of the future. We couldn’t have done that without gifts in Wills from people like you. In fact, more than one in three of our research projects is funded by gifts in Wills.

Will you join Don and remember the Macular Society in your Will? If you’d like to talk about it first, please get in touch; we’d love to hear from you.

Many people, like John, remember the Macular Society in their Will because of a family history of macular disease. Others may remember the Macular Society in their Will to honour a loved one who suffered life-changing sight loss in older age.

“How does UK research compare to research going on elsewhere; in Japan, China or the US - for example?”

Although we may not fund as much research as other countries, the quality of our research is unbeatable. Some of the most significant research projects on macular disease are happening right here in the UK. An example of that would be the clinical trial being run by Professor Andrew Lotery from University of Southampton, which is using eye scans of people with early AMD to learn more about the progression of the disease to late AMD and sight loss. Researchers have said this is the most important trial in AMD anywhere in the world. There’s lots of research going on in China, Japan and the US, all of whom have big problems with macular disease, but the work in the UK compares favourably with those countries and is regarded as world-leading.