Wellcome News 62 editorial
Unlike our previous five-year Plans, our new framework covers the next decade. It takes a long time to make scientific discoveries, so we want to empower researchers to ask difficult and challenging questions and give them the confidence that they will have the time and resources to find the answers.
New focus areas
What is also new is that we are making explicit the areas where we will focus our resources through our fellowships, Investigator Awards and Strategic Awards. We will continue to develop our international funding. We are also making clear our direction of travel to increase our support for work that will lead to the application of research, capitalising on the many exciting discoveries that are emerging from the scientific community. We believe that an understanding of the social, political and historical contexts of biomedical science and its application is essential for research to deliver its full potential to society and we will continue to strongly support activities in this area.
As part of the Plan, we set out five huge research challenges - on genetics and genomics, the brain, infectious disease, ageing and chronic disease, and the environment and nutrition. These are areas where we already fund many talented researchers and activities, but we are now setting out our vision for how our funding can have a significant impact over the next ten years and beyond. The challenges provide a framework and the context for how we want to work with the research community and with other funders; they are deliberately inclusive and broad, and although some research will be more aligned to the challenges than others, the primary criteria for our funding will remain the quality of the individuals, their teams and their research questions.
Environment and health
One of our challenges, on environment, nutrition and health, has not been an area that we have explicitly focused on before. Major changes in the environment are affecting high-income as well as low- and middle-income countries. There are strong environmental factors involved in the many health problems seen in countries that have gone through a demographic transition - such as obesity, late-onset diabetes and hypertension. We believe that research can have a major impact on public health, with effects on the health of millions, and this will be an important area of development for us in the coming years.
Alongside our Strategic Plan, we are finalising our exciting new Investigator Awards - the full details of which will be available in June this year. Our philosophy for many years has been to fund people; our fellowship schemes have always been innovative and we are now extending the principles behind these to researchers who have established posts within universities and research institutes. We hope that this will broaden the reach of the 'Wellcome family', and will bring new ideas for how the Strategic Plan can evolve during the next decade.
Mark Walport
Director of the Wellcome Trust
