Wellcome News 65 editorial
It is a fascinating story, of how a charitable foundation with only one asset - Sir Henry Wellcome’s pharmaceutical company, which was insolvent by 1947 - came to be fully independent and able to take a world-leading role in funding research.
The story of the origin of the Trust is well known. On Wellcome's death in 1936, the share capital of his company, the Wellcome Foundation Limited, was vested in the Wellcome Trust. Income from the capital would be used to advance medical research and understanding of its history. As Wellcome pointed out in his will, "With the enormous possibility of development in chemistry, bacteriology, pharmacy and allied sciences…there are likely to be vast fields opened for productive enterprise for centuries to come."
Less well known are the struggles of the Trust's early years. So complex were Wellcome's affairs and diverse enterprises - and the need to pay enormous estate duties - that the Trust's income was fairly low in its first 20 years, and its total charitable expenditure for the period was £1.2 million. The company struggled through World War II and the demands of postwar reorganisation.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Trust's funding tended to focus on buildings, laboratories and equipment - notably electron microscopes. From the mid-1960s, it began to focus more on personal grants to individual scientists, and its funding grew markedly - as between 1966 and 1986, annual sales of the Wellcome Foundation grew from £32m to over £500m. Most of this growth was owing to the astonishing success of George Hitchings and Gertrude Elion, who worked for over 30 years at the Wellcome Research Laboratories in North Carolina. They pioneered 'rational drug design' - investigating specific molecular targets for potential drugs – and their achievements included the first ever treatment for leukaemia and the first immunosuppressive agent, used for organ transplants. Their work was rewarded with the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
It is rare for an organisation to have a single transformative moment. But the Trust had one in February 1986, when it floated the Wellcome Foundation on the stock market. Over the next 15 years, it sold all the shares and became fully independent. With the proceeds of the sales, it could diversify its assets, allowing extraordinary growth. In 1988 its asset base was £3.4 billion; today it is around £13bn. Annual spending on research was on average £28m in the 1980s; today, it is around £600m - a more than 20-fold increase.
So these are the bare bones of the story, but what they do not show are the personalities that the Trust has worked with. For we have been privileged to be associated with and to support the work of many superb scientists. Henry Foy, the Trust's first scientific employee, studied malaria in Greece in the 1930s - and was captured by bandits at one point while collecting mosquitoes - then moved to Kenya. His research team eventually evolved into our Major Overseas Programme in Kenya. The sheep studies of Graham 'Mont' Liggins led to the now standard treatment of giving steroids to women in premature labour, to help the lungs of preterm babies. Ralph Lainson,funded by us since 1964, has transformed our understanding of leishmaniasis in South America. Sir John Sulston led the UK contributions to the Human Genome Project. Nick White's pioneering studies of the drug artemisinin have led to its wordwide adoption in treatment for malaria.
We plan a range of activities and publications for 2011 to mark this anniversary and expand upon some of these individual stories, and I hope that you will join with us in celebrating 75 extraordinary years.
Sir Mark Walport
Director of the Wellcome Trust