Sponsor
The Wellcome Trust and Darwin
Founded in 1936, the Wellcome Trust is the largest charity in the UK. We spend about €600 million a year, both in the UK and internationally, achieving our mission: to foster and promote research with the aim of improving human and animal health.
Through our long-term commitment to funding, we are helping to build a vibrant research environment, in the UK and overseas, in which new knowledge can flourish. We are equally committed to encouraging public interest in and debate around the impact of science and healthcare on people's lives.
In all of our funding, we aim to invest in excellence, supporting outstanding people with the most innovative and exciting ideas. We fund the work of thousands of talented scientists, historians, social scientists, ethicists and science communicators worldwide.
www.wellcome.ac.uk
Public Engagement with Science
In addition to the Wellcome Trust's well–known support of open–access publishing (our sponsorship of this issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience will make it freely available around the world for six months), we also regard engaging the public as an intrinsic element of scientific activity. In addition to our new public venue, Wellcome Collection in London (www.wellcomecollection.org), we provide grant funding of up to US$10 million per year for work involving the widest range of communities. For the Darwin bicentenary in 2009, we have commissioned and funded Darwin–related experiments for every schoolchild in Britain. This included the development and free distribution of an evolutionary treasure chest to each of the 23 000 primary schools in the UK, enabling young children to perform simple biological experiments, and a series of contemporary experiments for older children. These and a range of other resources including the award-winning 'Tree of Life' video featuring Sir David Attenborough are available under Creative Commons via www.wellcome.ac.uk/darwin200.
Science Funding
In our promotion of biomedical research, we support both strategic and response-mode grant applications in a variety of areas. Streams of research support include funding committees (study panels) for research on Molecules, Genes and Cells, Infection and Immunity, and Neuroscience and Mental Health. Across this broad portfolio, currently supported projects include fundamental work on gene regulation, epigenetics, viral mutations and gene–environment interactions – all topics that are of relevance to evolution.
Genetics
Perhaps the most visible has been that of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (near Cambridge, UK), which was responsible for sequencing one–third of the human genome as part of the Human Genome Project. The draft sequence was first published in Nature in 2001, and has been followed by other important projects focused on studying multiple human genomes — the SNP Consortium, the HapMap Project (launched in 2003, first paper published in 2005) and the 1000 Genomes Project (2008). These aim to catalogue and understand genetic variation between individuals. In addition, we have taken an international lead in the funding of genome–wide association studies (GWAS) resulting in a landmark publication focused on seven common diseases published in Nature in 2007. This new GWAS approach, and the emerging ability to conduct whole–genome sequencing rapidly and relatively cheaply, offers opportunities to search for genetic mutations that may be involved in human disease on a scale not previously realised.
Neuroscience and Mental Health
Our Neuroscience and Mental Health funding stream supports innovative research that is likely to increase our understanding of the nervous system in normal and disease states. It covers a broad portfolio, but includes topics relevant to evolution such as the development of the brain, gene activation in association with learning and memory, and the diversity of signal-transduction mechanisms.
We invite or receive high–quality research proposals that cover all aspects of neuroscience and mental health research, including molecular and cellular neuroscience, cognitive, neuropsychological and imaging research, and clinically oriented proposals investigating specific neurologicaland psychiatric conditions. Several conditions and diseases of the nervous system are thought to be caused by a complex mix of genetic and environmental factors. At present, there are no cures for most of these conditions: at best the symptoms can be ameliorated. New research offers our best hope of tackling these disorders.
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