Michael Morgan, the orchestrator of the Wellcome Trust's genomics initiatives and the new chief scientific officer of Genome Canada, is certain that his far-reaching influence wouldn't have been possible had he followed the typical path of a bench scientist.

While studying microbiology at Trinity College, Dublin, Morgan was seduced by biochemistry as a way to study the chemical processes that unite life. After his PhD at the University of Leicester, UK, during which he probed the regulation of carbohydrate metabolism in Escherichia coli, Morgan received a Commonwealth Fund scholarship to do a postdoc wherever he liked in the United States. Studying somatic cell genetics and virology there was refreshing, he says, because high-risk, cutting-edge scientific experiments were encouraged.

Back in Britain, Morgan spent several years lecturing at Leicester. But academia had little support from the UK government during the 1980s and he jumped at the chance of involvement with the Wellcome Trust's new cell- and molecular-biology grants programme. Although its initial budget was a fraction of today's, Morgan enjoyed his newfound access to people and money. “I was able to engage across a broader spectrum of science,” he says.

As the Wellcome Trust grew, so did his responsibilities. Morgan's most profound career decision was to facilitate Wellcome's involvement with human genome sequencing efforts. In addition to arguing that data from the human genome sequence should be released quickly into the public domain to encourage international cooperation, Morgan helped form the Sanger and Wellcome Trust policies, says Martin Bobrow, the trust's deputy chairman. Those policies became the foundation for the international data-sharing principles. The Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Sanger Institute and European Bioinformatics Institute followed, as Morgan helped put in place Britain's much-needed genomics infrastructure.

A reorganization of the trust led to his appointment as director of research partnerships and ventures, where he began managing high-profile projects such as the SNPs Consortium and the Structural Genomics Consortium.

Now Morgan is heading for Genome Canada, a non-profit genomic and proteomic research foundation set up in 2000 and running five new research centres. His mission, he says, is to amass the scientific rigour and expertise necessary to carry out an ambitious scientific agenda.