In October 2000, Allan Bradley became the new Director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. It may have appeared a tough task as his predecessor, John Sulston, Knight of the Realm and Nobel Prize winner, had not only overseen the birth of the Sanger back in the early 1990s, but had also become the iconic face of the Human Genome Project.

Yet, four years on, Dr Bradley’s quiet influence is obvious. While the Sanger continues its formidable output of DNA sequence data, upon which its world-wide reputation was founded, it has diversified and expanded with new technologies and new expertise.

Dr Bradley’s mantra of ‘bringing biology to the genome’ has led to the recruitment of 16 new faculty, almost doubling the number of scientific leaders, and a new title for the centre – the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

“The perception of the Sanger is changing from a purely sequencing centre to a biological research institute with a strong genetics focus,” he says. “We have researchers at the start of their careers, researchers who are renowned internationally, and we have recruited a lot more postdocs and PhD students.”

To answer their biological questions, the researchers can harness the Sanger’s high-throughput technology. And they are applying it to many different questions, in a wide range of organisms, from bacteria to mice, yeast to humans. The choice of organism is not important, argues Dr Bradley: “It’s the quality of the science that is most important.”

See also

• Genes and cognition
• Learning disability
• Cell-surface interactions
• Genetics of deafness