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Dexter: believes the trust ‘has a responsibility to stand up for the scientific community’. Credit: WELLCOME TRUST

Britain's Wellcome Trust, which describes itself as “the world's biggest medical research charity”, has chosen a prominent cancer researcher to lead it into the next century.

Mike Dexter, only recently appointed director of the Paterson Institute in Manchester, which is largely funded by the Cancer Research Campaign, will succeed Dame Bridget Ogilvie on her retirement next year.

There had been discussion about whether the trust, whose capital assets, estimated to be worth more than £10 billion ($16 billion), are even larger than those of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the United States, might turn to the business community to recruit its new chief executive.

Instead, the trustees have chosen a widely respected haematologist with experience both as a researcher — he has published more than 300 scientific papers — and in research administration as, for example, chairman of the Medical Research Council (MRC)'s molecular and cellular medicine board.

As one of the three co-founders of Therxsys, Britain's first gene-therapy start-up company which is partly owned by the MRC and has rights to key MRC research on gene vectors, Dexter also has direct experience of working on the commercial applications of scientific discoveries, an increasingly important dimension of the trust's activity.

Dexter says the trust, which has recently taken a lead in establishing a clear career structure for research scientists, “has a responsibility to stand up for the scientific community, and to make sure that funding goes to where the science is excellent, not necesssarily where some other organization would like it to go”.

Having been closely involved in gene-therapy research in Manchester, Dexter says he is keen to support the trust's growing involvement in issues concerned with the public understanding of science — and particularly exploring the implications of modern genetics. “It is important that we bring the public along with us,” he says.

Dexter's appointment is described as “inspirational” by Gordon McVie, director-general of the Cancer Research Campaign, which has supported Dexter's research since the early 1970s.

“He has a wealth of experience in biology and a terrific grasp of the technical side of experiments, and the fact that he comes from the cancer side of things is no drawback, as we have been closely linked with many important developments in genetics in recent years,” says McVie. Ironically, Sir Henry Wellcome specified in his will setting up the trust in 1936 that no money was to be used for cancer research as such.