Corporate activities 2005/06

Governors and senior staff

Sir William ('Bill') Castell (above) took over as Chairman of the Wellcome Trust's Board of Governors in May 2006, succeeding Sir Dominic Cadbury, who retired from the Board. Bill was formerly President and CEO of GE Healthcare, the medical diagnostics and biosciences business of the General Electric Company of the USA, and also a Vice-Chairman at General Electric. Before that, he was Chief Executive of Amersham plc. He has a wealth of experience in global healthcare and has also been involved in many not-for-profit activities.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Deputy Rector of Imperial College London and an expert in immunology and viral infections, joined the Board of Governors in January 2006.

In January 2006, Susannah Randall was appointed the Trust's Head of Communications.

Contributions to policy-making

The Trust continued to play an active role in the drive towards open access models of science publishing. A nine-strong group of UK research funders, including the Trust, awarded a contract to run UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) to a partnership of the British Library, the University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute. UKPMC will provide free online access to the digital archive of published articles resulting from research paid for by any of the funding consortium.

The Trust also reached agreement with a range of science publishers, ensuring that material can be deposited in UKPMC by authors according to the Trust's Grant Conditions without infringing publishers' copyright.

Several submissions to Government consultations were made during the year, including responses to the Department for Education and Skills's consultation on the reform of higher education research assessment and funding, and to the Department of Health's consultation on the regulations to be made under the Mental Capacity Act 2005. The Trust also contributed to the Cooksey Review, which has been considering the nature of the UK's unified health research fund.

With the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal Society and the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Trust supported an in-depth study, by an independent committee chaired by Sir David Weatherall, on the use of non-human primates in research.

The Trust and the MRC have jointly published an informational booklet on non-human primate use.

Buildings

New research facilities at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge, were opened by HRH The Princess Royal in October 2005.

Significant work was undertaken during the year to convert the Wellcome Building, the Trust's former headquarters, into a public space. The venue, to be known as Wellcome Collection, is due to open in 2007 and will house a range of permanent and temporary exhibitions, a forum space, a Conference Centre, a bookshop and café, as well as the Wellcome Library and researchers from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.

The Trust's current headquarters, the Gibbs Building, 215 Euston Road, London, was again a major attraction during Open House weekend in September 2006. Its eclectic window displays are a talking point for passers-by, while guided tours are given for visitors keen to see Thomas Heatherwick's sculpture ‘Bleigiessen’, a 30-metre installation composed of 150 000 specially processed glass spheres.