Grantholders e-newsletter

Issue 4, May 2006

1. Stop press: Licensing under the Human Tissue Act

This is to alert you to new licensing requirements for establishments storing human tissue, organs or cells (including blood) for research, which come into effect on 1 September 2006. Relevant establishments in England, Wales or Northern Ireland (not Scotland) should register with the Human Tissue Authority before 22 May 2006 in order to be considered for a licence from 1 September. Further details and a simple registration form [Word 60KB] can be found on the Human Tissue Authority's website.

2. Are you ready for eGrants?

From 1 October grant applications for most Wellcome Trust schemes must be submitted using the eGrants system. We recommend that from now on, Word application forms should not be used if an eGrants form is available.

See our website for further information about eGrants and a list of application forms now available.

Note that the system has been streamlined as a result of feedback from a participant survey, as well as issues identified by the Trust.

Of those eGrants users who responded to the survey, over 90 per cent were either fairly or very satisfied with the eGrants system of submission. Users found the system to be very stable and easy to use, with a clear layout and useful guidance provided if needed. Perhaps most importantly, nearly 80 per cent of those who had experience of both the old-style application forms and eGrants felt the new system was better.

3. Interested in biomedical ethics?

Get connected with the Wellcome Ethics Bulletin. Keep up to date with funding opportunities at the Trust, meetings, news – subscribe or view the content online.

And why not sign-up for the Biomedical Ethics Summer School, 'Psychology, Neuroethics and Society', taking place in Cambridge from 19-22 September 2006? The closing date for applications is 16 June 2006.

4. Training opportunity: Public Engagement in schools

We are offering a unique opportunity to Trust-funded researchers to take part in a two day training course in communicating science to school audiences. The training has been developed specifically for Wellcome researchers and will be held at the National Science Learning Centre in York on 17-18 July 2006. We encourage researchers from across all our funding schemes to apply. The Trust will cover the cost of attending but places are limited.

5. Technology Transfer: Transfer Awards

New application forms for Transfer Awards are now available.

Translation Awards (TAs) are grants designed to respond to the funding gap in the commercialisation of new technologies in the biomedical area. The Awards:

aim to enhance the opportunities for research exploitation broadly and across the university sector
provide support for projects that will be managed by principal investigators and technology transfer offices working together
may also be used to support joint projects involving participants from more than one institution.

6. Support for animal health research

Did you know that we fund research into animal health in its own right, regardless of relevance to human disease? Animal health, zoonoses and emerging infections are of particular interest.

7. Myths and misconceptions exploded

When out and about over the last year, our staff have come across a number of misconceptions about the Trust which we would like to correct:

Myth 1: You are unlikely to be awarded a Wellcome fellowship if you have previously had funding for a Research Council fellowship.
We were surprised to hear this – our grant holders, including fellows, have varied CVs with funding from numerous sources. The fact that a candidate may have had funding from a research council has no bearing on his or her application.
Myth 2: The Trust doesn't like applicants to suggest referees.
On the contrary – the more suggestions we have the better. We reserve the right not to use the referees you have suggested - we may decide there is a conflict of interest, or that someone else is more appropriate – but any information that could help us with the peer review process is welcome.

Myth 3: Commercial collaborations are actively discouraged and may make you ineligible for Trust funding.
We fund both basic and applied research. We think it is desirable to encourage appropriate scientific relationships between Trust-funded researchers and commercial organisations. But the Trust is a charity, and we have to make sure that, for Trust-funded research:

there is a proper balance between public benefit and incidental private benefit
Intellectual Property is properly protected and exploited
conflicts of interest are declared and managed.

Our full Policy on relationships between Trust-funded researchers and commercial organizations [Word 32KB] can be found on the website, but don't hesitate to contact us with any queries at grantenquiries@wellcome.ac.uk – these will be dealt with sympathetically and confidentially.

8. Open access publishing

Just a reminder that new Grant Condition 6 (iii) becomes mandatory from 1 October 2006. More details on our policy on open access publishing can be found on our website.

9. Open access papers: recent highlights

Recognising the benefits of open access, a number of Trust-funded researchers are already publishing their research in journals that support this model. Below, we provide a summary of some recent highlights.

IQ: good for your health?
There is a strong correlation between socioeconomic hardship and ill-health. One possibility is that this is due to the impact of IQ on socioeconomic status – which are also closely correlated. To examine the impact of IQ, Wellcome Fellow David Batty and colleagues at the University of Glasgow analysed data from a population in the West of Scotland. Their analysis suggests that much of the negative impact of socioeconomic status (but not all of it) is linked to IQ.

Batty GD et al. BMJ. 2006 Mar 11;332(7541):580-4. Full text

Phantom rabbits
Researchers have cracked the cutaneous rabbit illusion. Optical illusions show how our visual perceptions can be tricked, but our sense of touch can also be fooled – as in the 'cutaneous rabbit illusion'. Rapid taps to the wrist, then to the elbow, can create an illusion of touches between the two, as if a rabbit has hopped up the arm. Felix Blankenburg, Jon Driver and colleagues at University College London found that the illusion activated the areas of the somatosensory cortex – the area of the brain processing touch signals – corresponding to the points of illusory contact.

Blankenburg F et al. PLoS Biol. 2006;4(3):e69. Full text

Active investigation
Exercise is well known to be good for us, and a part of many public health programmes. And there are concerns that sedentary lifestyles in adolescence may be storing up future health problems. In a study of more than 4000 young people in south Brazil, Pedro Hallal and colleagues have looked for links between biological and social factors linked to low levels of activity. They found no evidence that physiological factors in infancy affected activity. A link was found with birth order, possibly because younger children had elder siblings to play with.

Hallal PC et al. BMJ. 2006 Apr 29;332(7548):1002-7. Full text