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Sir Mark Walport: It's been a really exciting year at the Wellcome Trust and what I'm going
to talk about is partnerships, because everything that the Wellcome Trust does we fund in partnership
with others. A really important partnership that we announced this year was to develop
a new institute - the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation. This is a partnership
between the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK and University
College London. And the partners have bought a piece of land just north of the British
Library, adjacent to St Pancras station, so at the gateway to Europe, with very good communications,
and this will be a great new institute for the 21st century.
We've also developed some key partnerships internationally. In India we've entered into
a partnership with the Indian Department of Biotechnology to create a new fellowship scheme
for scientists in India. We've agreed to commit £8 million a year for the next five years
and the Indian government an equal sum of money, and this will fund scientific fellowship
opportunities for everyone from junior postdoctoral scientists to some of the most senior scientists in India.
One of the most important things for the 21st century is the education of the next generations
of scientists and also of citizens who appreciate the importance of science in everyday life.
For a number of years now, the Wellcome Trust has supported as part of a partnership with
the government, the continuing professional development of science teachers. This year
saw the announcement of a new project, a partnership between the Wellcome Trust, industry and the
government, called Project Enthuse.
Sir Bill Castell: Project Enthuse is a project which is dedicated to create inspiration in
our children at school in terms of inspiration in science. We decided that we could use the
wonderful facilities of the National Science Learning Centre at York and use them to maximum
capacity by saying we're going to give every primary and secondary teacher that teaches
science in the United Kingdom the opportunity of professional training. And basically we
want to get the teachers to get great content, science content, numerate content, which is
relevant to today's world, because part of the challenges of teachers, you leave university
at 22 and that's the last bit of science you've got. So we want to bring back the continuous
professional development for science teachers - we pay for their travel, we pay for their
teacher coverage back at their school, we pay for their education at the Centre and
we pay for them to have kits to go back to the school, so it's a sort of five-star training
programme where we're not asking the school to in any way go into their meagre budgets,
we're paying for it. What we want from the teacher is their commitment to really work
hard and feel inspired by what we've given them, to transmit the excitement of science to their pupils.
MW: The mission for the Wellcome Trust is to foster research with the aim of improving
human and animal health and that means translating discoveries from the laboratory into the clinic.
One of the major infections that is an increasing problem for humans at the moment is tuberculosis,
and we still use an old and only partially effective vaccine that's more than 50 years
old. So this year we were very pleased to be able to fund a study by Dr Helen McShane
of Oxford University, working in South Africa, of the early clinical trials of a possible
new vaccine for tuberculosis.
Dr Ted Bianco: TB is an enormous health problem as identified by the World Health Organization
as an international health emergency in 1993. Currently it's estimated there are about two
billion people infected with TB; that's a third of the world's population, around nine
million new cases arising each year and about 1.7 million deaths. This is a catastrophic
scale of human misery and it's a problem that has proved very difficult for the international
community to contain.
Vaccines are key because to prevent the infection rather than deal with the consequence with
drugs is a hugely efficient way to work if you have the means at your disposal. BCG has
been very actively used over many years in young children and it does prevent some of
the conditions that arise in the young child, but it doesn't deal with pulmonary TB and
it doesn't deal with a disease that is in our minds, in this conversation, which is
pulmonary TB in the adult population. So it's necessary to have a new approach to vaccination
and the technique that Helen McShane and her colleagues are following is to take a vaccine
tool that was used for the eradication of smallpox, that's vaccinia virus, and to insert
into that vaccinia virus elements of the TB bacterium, a particular antigen called 85A,
which will induce a response to the TB bacterium in immunised individuals in a way that boosts
the level of immunity that BCG vaccine normally confers. So what they're doing is they're
going to build a vaccine that can be used after BCG to enhance the immune responsiveness
and, we hope, protection against disease.
MW: One of the areas the Wellcome Trust works in is the area of policy surrounding important
issues affecting medicine, health and medical research. A particularly controversial area
has been human embryonic stem cells, which have great scientific potential but also raise
serious ethical issues. And an important event during the year was a debate between religious
leaders and scientists, and although it would be wrong to say there was a complete meeting
of minds in this venue, I think both sides came to a much better understanding of the
key issues in the debate and where are the differences. And ultimately there was a piece
of excellent legislation passed through the Houses of Parliament this year.
I'm standing in the Wellcome Collection next to an exhibit of a printout of the whole of
the human genome, and nothing illustrates the scale of the human genome more than this
printout where you can see all of the sequence printed out in tiny type.
This has been the first full year of operation of the Wellcome Collection and we've had more
than 300 000 visitors. We've had a range of splendid exhibitions in the Wellcome Collection
and these have ranged from an exhibition of 26 skeletons done in partnership with the
Museum of London in the summer, which attracted long queues, through to an exhibition of patterns
and fabrics that hadn't been seen since the Festival of Britain in 1951, through to a
really moving exhibition entitled "Life Before Death", which showed photographs of people
of all ages with serious illnesses taken before and after they'd died. And this really moving
exhibition enabled people to confront death, which is something that in modern societies
fortunately we don't have to do too often.
Ken Arnold: This has been a fantastically exciting year for us. Last year we proved
that we could open a new venue, this year we've proved that we can welcome well over
300 000 visitors and put on the most varied and exciting cultural programme in London
- I would say, modestly. So highlights have been everything from a weekend of welcoming
6000 people to do everything you can imagine relating drawing and medical sciences, so
drawing your outline, thinking about your insides, drawing on the sounds around you,
relating it all to your health, to your wellbeing, to your anatomy, through to moments of quiet
contemplation, exhibitions where people have really stopped to think about the moment before
you die and what you might be thinking about your life and again, research projects that
explore the whole human condition and bring it in to exhibitions and events.
MW: Looking to the next year, it's always impossible to predict the future of science,
what people will discover, but one area where we can be certain that there are going to
be advances in the next few years is in knowledge derived from the sequence of the human genome.
Scientists at the Sanger Institute are playing a leading role in an international collaboration
called the 1000 Genome Project, which will completely sequence the genomes of a thousand
people from around the world and will tell us much more about human variation, about
human evolution and ultimately about how we vary in both health and disease.