The Wellcome Trust Research Career Re-Entry Fellowships (RCREF) support people who want to return to science following a substantial break (2 years or more). Getting back to a career in research is not just a matter of funding, and it may be hard to know where to start. With this in mind, the Trust has created a guide for people thinking of taking a break from research, or planning to return to a research career in biomedical/public health. Shewly Choudhury, from our Science Division helped put the guide together with a group of the current and former RCRE Fellows, and speaks to two members of the this group who contributed their experiences to this high-level guide…
“I took a 10-year break from research for family reasons, during which time I combined childcare with science-writing work” explains Jessica Buxton, a former RCRE Fellow now at UCL. She returned to full-time research in 2009, but not without some trepidation.
For Christiaan van Ooij, leaving bench science behind originally felt like a permanent step. “As time went by, I missed it more and more” he says, “but thought that I was not eligible (or hopelessly uncompetitive without an active research programme) for any Fellowship that would support a continuation in science”. Christiaan returned to full-time research in 2011.
These are common concerns, but taking a career break needn’t be the end of your research career. There are a number of funding schemes out there, including the Wellcome Trust Research Career Re-entry Fellowship, which can support a return to science and we hope that our new guide will be help to answer some of the questions you might have. The guide also describes some of the different Fellowships that support a return to research after a break of several years as well tips that may help you to produce a more competitive proposal.
Here are some of Christiaan and Jessica’s tips for getting back into scientific research:
Be prepared
“It’s hard work, but if you were passionate about science before your break, then the chances are that the effort required to get back into a career you love will be well worth the effort” says Jessica. There is a lot of competition for Fellowships, so ensure that you thoroughly prepare for your application and interview.
Get up to date
Find out what’s happening in your field and what’s changed since you left the lab. There is a wealth of resources online, including open access articles, podcasts, and science news services. “Contacting former colleagues or following scientists on Twitter is another good way to hear about important new advances in your field” says Jessica. For Christiaan his non-lab work also helped him keep up his connections: “I was working as an editor at a microbiology, which allowed me to stay on top of the developments in my field and maintain contacts with former colleagues”. “This made it a lot easier to incorporate the latest technologies in my research plan and update it with the latest findings” he says.
Be realistic
Returning to a career in research will take time and energy. “If possible, try and time your return to fit around your other commitments and the support available” advises Jessica. “In my case, returning to full-time research coincided with my husband launching his own business and working from home, so he was able to take over the ‘parent-taxi’ duties”.
Find a good mentor
Having someone to support you and help you navigate your return to research science can be a real help. They can help you plan the steps on your journey and introduce you to people and inspire you to try new things.
Ask for help
It is inevitable that things will have changed in the time that you’ve been away. When you return to the lab, don’t be afraid to ask how a new technique works, or for advice on the best way to tackle your research question. “Most people are very happy to share their expertise” says Jessica.
Plan for the future
Once you’ve returned to research, the challenge is to stay – for that you’ll need publications, ideas, funding and supportive collaborators. Early on in your post-break career, you should try to identify your long-term research goals, and stay focused on what you need to do to achieve them. Have open conversations about paper authorship at the start of projects.
So was the hardwork worth it? “Once I had overcome the initial terror of donning a lab coat and picking up a pipette for the first time in a decade, the experience of working with enthusiastic students at the start of their careers made me realise how much I missed being a researcher” says Jessica.
“Returning to science has been a wonderful experience” says Christiaan, “Being back in the lab on a daily basis has been a wonderful experience; the time away from it has certainly allowed me to see what a great job it is”.
You can access the “Returners’ guide to research: Getting back into research after a career break” and find out more about the Wellcome Trust Research Career Re-entry Fellowship scheme on the Wellcome Trust website.
Researcher Spotlight: Professor Mike Barrett
Mike Barrett is Professor of Biochemical Parasitology and Director of Glasgow Polyomics and a member of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology at the University of Glasgow. His work involves interpretation of enormous datasets, with a core focus on drug action and resistance in protozoa. We asked Michael to explain his work and share some of the highlights of his career…
What are you working on?
My core research revolves around identifying how protozoa become resistant to drugs and how drugs work.
This work lead to me founding “Glasgow Polyomics”, where we use state of the art technology to collect data on genomes, proteomes and metabolomes. We do this in an informatics-rich environment, enabling us to optimise interpretation of these huge datasets.
Genomics is the best known of these technologies – most people are familiar with the fact we can now systematically generate sequence information on whole genomes relatively easily. Proteomics looks at all of the proteins in a given system and metabolomics quantifies the small chemical building blocks from which everything is built. We really can dissect life down to its constituent pieces. The great strides in reductionist biology are more or less complete.
The challenge, however, has been to understand how these component pieces fit together to create “life”, which is very much more than the interaction of numerous inanimate chemicals. We now apply polyomics at every level of biological research. I am fortunate in having two fantastic teams in parasitology and in polyomics, teams of people with absolute dedication and amazing skills sets.
What does your average day involve?
As I’m split across two campuses, one where my parasitolgy research team works, the other where Glasgow Polyomics resides, I carry my time between sites. Mornings are usually spent strategically planning research at either site, talking to team members about experiments and prioritising timetables. Afternoons then give me the opportunity to write papers, grant proposals or deal with the myriad of queries stemming from our research.
Why is your work important?
Learning how drugs work against protozoa and how parasites become resistant to drugs is necessary given the importance of drugs in our efforts to control the devastating diseases caused by parasitic protozoa.
Scanning electron micrograph of trypanosomes in blood, courtesy of Dr Laurence Tetley
Human African trypanosomiasis, sleeping sickness, reached staggering levels by the end of the 20th Century, an with estimated 300,000 people infected.
I was privileged to be involved in bringing a new compound forward through the early part of the 21st Century, and was amazed to see that the implementation of serious clinical trials alone was enough to have a major impact on the disease.
Since then other new compounds have come forward, money has been raised, and a concerted international effort has bought reported cases of sleeping sickness down to fewer than a total of 7,000 reported cases.
As part of our efforts to understand how drugs worked we introduced the new technology of metabolomics to trypanosome research about ten years ago, and have steadily introduced ever more sophisticated techniques to gain information on the inner workings of parasites.
The technology, though, is generic and we quickly began to use metabolimics to look at biological changes associated with drug action in a multitude of systems, as well as to see how biochemistry is perturbed in different disease states. Since genes and proteins are also part of the information cascade that leads to these changes in biochemistry we also incorporated genomics, proteomics and metabolomics into a single site, called “Glasgow Polyomics”.
Over the last three years we have carried out several hundred projects ranging from the discovery of new biomarkers for stroke, and how drugs act in a multitude of diseases (including rheumatoid arthritis, malaria and bacterial sepsis) to investigating the fluctuating state of health of wildebeest by analysis of metabolites found in their tail hairs.
The metabolomics team are using mass spectrometry to study the authenticity of Burns’s poetry and have even been asked to study Martian rocks for isotopes that might indicate life on Mars!
As a Scottish-based facility, showing the public how whisky can be described in terms of its chemical composition – determined using the same machinery we use to look at the chemical composition of people’s body fluids – has been fun too.
What do you hope the impact of your work will be?
My immediate hope is that our work on sleeping sickness will make a positive contribution to the international effort underway with a hope of eliminating that disease by 2030. Longer term I hope that in having set up Glasgow Polyomics we can contribute to the amelioration of numerous other diseases.
How did you come to be working on this topic/in this field?
As an undergraduate in Zoology at UCL I went on an expedition to the Usumbara mountains in Tanzania in 1985. The inequalities in health I witnessed there were eye-opening. This was at the beginning of the molecular revolution, and it seemed we should be readily able to understand the causes of disease and also to defeat them. I decided then to carry out a PhD in Parasitology and have continued in this area until now.
How has Wellcome funding helped you/your research/your career?
Wellcome Trust funding has been critical throughout my career. From my first post-doc, my first project grant as an independent investigator, through to today the Trust has been a key funder in my research.
Of course this goes back to Sir Henry Wellcome’s own interest in tropical diseases which has meant the Trust continued to back research in this area even when it had become unfashionable elsewhere. Today, the funding the Trust provides through its Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF) award is the cornerstone of our developments at Glasgow Polyomics. The core funding of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology has also been vital on enabling us to apply new technologies such as those in Polyomics to diseases associated with the world’s poorest people.
What’s the most frequently asked question about your work?
“Can you really do that?”
The mass spectrometry based approach to untargeted metabolomics reveals the relative quantities of hundreds or even thousands of individual metabolites in a given system in just a single experiment.
Which question about your work do you most dread – and why?
“Is 2030 a realistic target for the elimination of sleeping sickness?”
The gains made against trypanosomiasis have been incredible in the twenty first Century. However, the end games for other infectious diseases, like polio and Guinea worm, show how difficult elimination can be. Yet we are already witnessing funding agencies turning their backs on the disease when confronted with choices on where to put their resource.
Trypanosoma brucei metabolic network , present at the trypanocyc database
Tell us something about you that might surprise us…
I climbed Mont Ventoux as the last of a series of high mountains in France by bicycle this summer. (I’ve always loved sport although my contemporary physique offers few clues to this!).
What keeps you awake at night?
Excitement about a new discovery and its meaning can keep me awake with an energised buzz. Worries about deadlines, sustainability targets and the like can keep me awake in a less energised state too.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?
Decide what it is you want to do and pursue that irrespective of what others tell you about its worth.
The chain-reaction question, set by our previous spotlighted researcher Dr Faith Osier, is: What makes you really happy about your work and research?
Finding something new and of obvious impact and then validating the finding. Such discoveries are happening at an accelerated rate in Glasgow Polyomics, and telling our partners that they appear to have a really significant observation in their data is hugely gratifying.
You can find out more about Professor Mike Barrett’s work on his University of Glasgow researcher page and by visiting the Glasgow Polyomics website.
Image of the Week: Dissection
This week’s image of the week is interesting for a number of reasons. At first glance, it looks like a delicate antique fan that might keep you cool in the heat of summer, but in reality it is something entirely different.
What you’re actually seeing here is a thin section of a human stomach, which has been flattened and injected with wax. This technique was used to show the veins, arteries and delicate membrane of the stomach wall, which wouldn’t be so easily identifiable without wax.
This specimen dates back to between 1790 and 1823, and the other interesting fact is that it was prepared by Edward Jenner, more commonly known for his pioneering work on vaccination.
Thought of by many as ‘the father of immunology’, Jenner’s work helped lead to the eradication of smallpox. He was also known for his delicate dissections, which were an important part of medical education, due to a lack of bodies that could be used to show students the workings of the human body.
The specimen above may have been used as a teaching aid to show the structure of the stomach.
Image credit: Science Museum, London, Wellcome Images
Wellcome Images is one of the world’s richest and most unusual collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science. Over 100,000 high resolution images from our historical collections are now free to use under the Creative Commons-Attribution only (CC-BY) licence.
Getting passionate about primary science
One of the key priorities for the Wellcome Trust Education and Learning team is reinvigorating primary school science. We know that early encounters with science and discovery help to shape children’s understanding of the world and develop important skills. A recent Wellcome Trust study showed that some schools were missing out on access to specialist science expertise. Irchester Community Primary School, which was involved in the study, has taken an innovative approach providing a dedicated science space in the school and their very own scientist-in-residence, following the Lab-13 model. Wellcome Trust Primary Science Lead, Louise Stubberfield spoke to staff at Irchester, to find out how about their approach to science…
Jennifer Hogan, scientist-in-residence at Irchester Community Primary School
“It is so important that primary science is not a collection of facts to be learned, nor a set of limited predetermined fair-tests that are followed recipe-like to a known result. Real science is not like that!” says Tracy Tyrrell, science lead at Irchester Primary.
“I am passionate about science and it’s my job to make everyone else – the senior leadership team, teachers, children, parents and beyond – as enthused and excited about science as I am.
“Luckily, I have the help of our fabulous scientist-in-residence, Jennifer Hogan, and between us we manage to keep up-to-date with key developments in science and science pedagogy via Association for Science Education events, Twitter, STEMnet, etc. We trawl the internet and continuing professional development (CPD) sessions for innovative and inspiring activities and run staff training, whole-school events, community events and more in order to show everyone that science is remarkable, attention-grabbing, thought-provoking, motivating and fun.”
“We are all familiar with little ones asking “Why?”, “What’s that for?” and “What happens if…?” says scientist-in-residence Jennifer Hogan. “Our approach actively encourages and promotes this questioning and innate interest, to drive further investigation and encourage them to think like real scientists.”
“We passionately believe that science is curiosity driven, and children in our lab lead their own learning” she says. Jennifer has been the scientist-in-residence at Irchester for the past three years – after facing her future students on an interview panel.
“One of the unique elements of the Lab_13 model is that it is managed by a committee of eight 9-11 year olds”, she explains. “These children have responsibility for the day-to-day running of the lab and have control over all the decisions associated with that space.
“This allows them to build up their confidence and develop a wide range of skills and one of their first jobs as a committee was writing the job description, and conducting the interviews for the Scientist-in-residence post. Scary!”
The aim is to incorporate as much practical experimentation as possible, allowing the children to really “do” science and use real scientific equipment, giving them ownership of their investigations and allowing them to find out answers to questions for themselves.
“Our children lead from what they know and what they want to know, and the science lessons are tailored to their needs, abilities and interests” says Tracy. “They are able ask questions, plan their own investigations and ponder over results – drawing sensible conclusions or raising further questions.
“Spurred on by the success of the lab, curiosity is actively encouraged and celebrated in every class, and children’s questions form the basis of science planning across the school.
“We are not teaching children science, but teaching them how to be scientists” she explains. “It is an approach to learning that questions rather than accepts. It promotes critical and logical thinking with an open mind.
“How else will we create adults capable of furthering our understanding of our world and improving our lives?”
Jennifer says that being a scientist-in-residence is a hugely exciting and rewarding role. “All our investigations begin with a child’s question.
“My role is to guide them towards posing scientific questions and advise on the planning and conducting of investigations in the lab. This leads to wide range of subjects being covered on a day-to-day basis.”
But what do the children make of it? One boy who had been part of the Lab_13 Management Committee sums it up nicely: “The best thing about Lab_13 is now I know that, in science, sometimes “I don’t know” IS the right answer”.
Irchester primary school clearly makes the best use of its science expertise. But since there are few teachers who have specialised science knowledge, not all schools are so lucky.
In a recent Wellcome Trust survey, headteachers told us that the single action that would make a difference is ensuring that teachers can access high quality science CPD, but that action was, sadly, rarely prioritised. It’s vital then that the UK champions primary science as we recommend in our report.
You can access the full Wellcome Trust report, The Deployment of Science and Maths Leaders in Primary Schools on our website, where you can also read a summary of our recommendations based upon the findings.
How to Succeed at Open Innovation
Today we launch “Shaping the Future of Open Innovation: A practical guide for life sciences organisations”, a new resource created by a collaboration led by the Wellcome Trust, the Centre for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation (CASMI) and Kinapse. Rosie Pigott from CASMI, a Wellcome Trust seed funded initiative to accelerate the process of medical translation from bench to bedside, shares her top tips on open innovation.
“No single group can solve all the problems in this space. We need to work together in partnership.” Dr Gustavo Stolovitzky, Director, DREAM Project
In this increasingly open, collaborative, problem-solving world, open innovation has rapidly become accepted as standard practice in many areas of life sciences. In creating this report, we explored a selection of open innovation models that have emerged over recent decades and collated the different experiences and lessons-learned from partners, to feed into a practical tool kit that we could share.
Our definition of what ‘open’ means in this context was fairly broad and we examined a wide range of open innovation ‘experiments’ – from academic–industry collaborations to crowdsourcing.
For this project, we defined open innovation as the process of innovating with others for shared risk and reward in order to create new products, processes or ideas that could not otherwise have been achieved alone, or enabling them to be achieved more quickly, cheaply or efficiently.
We interviewed a number of experts from diverse organisations, and it soon became clear that there is no one-size-fits-all model for succeeding at open innovation. Project partners need to be open-minded about one another’s cultures, capabilities and constraints, and must allow sufficient room to tailor a partnership model that takes these factors into account.
A number themes that came out of the discussions and we’ve created a list of the top 15 strategies for establishing a successful open innovation initiative.
Ensure clear definitions
Clearly define the opportunities and potential benefits and risks for partners from the start. It is also important to consider conflicts of interest for each partner. Establish what everyone understands ‘open’ to mean in the context of the project. Partners should ensure that a mutually agreed and clear understanding exists and that this is expressed in writing before proceeding.
Align objectives
Ensure that you align all partners’ goals at the outset. Each party must unambiguously agree the objectives of the collaboration in writing, including any specific milestone targets to be achieved during the lifespan of the collaboration and what the ultimate outcomes should be. It may be that the objectives don’t align completely – at this point partners should consider whether a collaboration is really the most appropriate way to achieve their goals.
Be strategic
Don’t be opportunistic about engaging in open innovation. Only commit if it fits with strategic priorities and if the objectives are truly harmonised.
Clearly divide outputs
Think through what the outputs will be and how value will be distributed among partners throughout the project.
Appreciate partner expertise
Make the most of the diversity of experience and expertise within the partnership. Be sure to appreciate areas of knowledge and skill and commit quality resources.
Communicate, communicate, communicate!
Communication is key to maintaining openness and transparency, both internally and externally.
Don’t overlook issues of intellectual property (IP)
Set clear IP ownership policies and strategies establishing who will own any resulting IP rights and agree on what can be made public. Even in the most straightforward model where no IP will be claimed and all results are released to the public domain, the IP policy should be expressly and clearly agreed between the parties at the outset.
Define commercial benefit
Be clear about what the commercial benefit of the project could be, and how it will be captured and who by.
Create end-of-project guidelines
Be clear about what will happen at the end of the project. How will it wind-down? Who owns what?
Impartial environments
Have a neutral convener if this will facilitate decision-making.
Find ‘open’-minded people
Invest in building the right team to manage projects and relationships effectively.
Define responsibilities
Clearly define the roles of each partner and understand that there are expectations for every side to contribute.
Evaluate
A robust review process will help to keep the project on track and define the points where go/no-go decisions need to be made.
Be flexible
Maintain a level of flexibility in budgeting and ways of working and have the ability to evolve.
Work together
Open innovation involves collaboration. Listening to one another and sharing ideas is important. Don’t just try to tell partners what to do!
The boundaries of open innovation are continually progressing. The demand for open access research outputs is also intensifying, and crowdfunding is a growing phenomenon in the life sciences sector. We are moving towards a more open world, which organisations must engage in to survive. As social and economic pressures make the healthcare landscape more demanding for all, open innovation represents a major tool for the creation of a more productive and sustainable ecosystem.
Author Rosie Pigott works at CASMI, you can find out more about their work on their website, and read the full report Shaping the Future of Open Innovation: A practical guide for life sciences organisations.
Image credits: Working together – Lumaxart – CC-BY-SA, Open minded – Thinkpublic on Flickr – CC-BY-ND
Public Engagement Events Listing: Sept 2014
We have a packed month of events taking place both at the Wellcome Collection and around the UK, funded by our Engaging Science Awards.
Upcoming events include a showcase of the best and worst public health films of the 20th Century, an event celebrating humankind’s relationship with the whale, and an exhibition based on an artist’s personal experience of infertility and assisted conception. Take your pick!
Events
Dragon Café - Borough – every Monday in September
Bethlem Museum of the Mind and the Bethlem Gallery are co-curating a month at the Dragon Café, Mental Fight Club’s creative and imaginative space. Open every Monday from 12-8.30pm, activities include a panel discussion – ‘We Need to Talk About Sanctuary After the Asylum’ (15th September) and a site-specific dance performance, ‘Curdled’ (22nd September).
Ancient Medicine: Secrets of the Greeks – Wellcome Collection – 3pm-4pm, 4th September
The teaching of Hippocrates lies at the very foundation of Western medicine, but the early Greek understanding of the body remains a fascinating contrast to what we believe today. Discover how to coax a ‘wandering womb’ back to its rightful place and why Greek doctors waited for a ‘crisis’ during an illness.
Hendricks Carnival of Knowledge– Port Merion Festival – 4th-6th September
A day of events on the theme of ‘the universe inside your head’, including a memory clinic installation, a sonic tour of the brain, jelly-brain dissections, a zombie workshop with Frank Swain, an investigation into the history of lost emotions, and the chance to hear from neuroscientist Anil Seth about the mysteries of consciousness. Guerilla Science runs these events.
Health, Lies and Videotape – Electric Cinema, Birmingham – 8th September
Take a look at some of the best and worst public health films of the 20th Century in this session where experts will help you separate the fact from the fiction, and the daft from the downright dangerous… This People Award funded project run by the Academy of Medical Sciences takes places from 8-10pm as part of the British Science Festival.
Into the Unknown – Wellcome Collection – 7pm-8.30pm, 11th September
Carried along by the Age of Sail, humanity’s global curiosity sought out both medical innovations and cultural exchange. In this discussion uncover our human desire to question the unknown and the impact this has had on our minds and bodies. Who were these intrepid explorers, and what are today’s new challenges?
Packed Lunch: Music and Emotion – Wellcome Collection – 1pm-2pm, 17th September
Free event – first to arrive gets first pick of the seats! Listening to music is universal, but why do we like it so much? And how does it provoke such an emotional response? Join Marcus Pearce to hear about his research into the psychological mechanisms underlying our enjoyment of music.
Inner Voices, Inner Music – Durham – 17th-18th September
A two-day workshop about ‘voice-hearing’ and musical hallucinations, involving speakers from a broad range of disciplines. The Clerks will give a pilot performance of their new piece, ‘Musical Hauntings’.
Open House London– Bethlem Royal Hospital – 20th September
This will be the first chance to visit the new Museum of the Mind, in the Art Deco former administration block of the hospital. Tours will take place at 10 and 11am: arrive early, as spaces are very limited. The museum will be open until 5pm, with a chance to find out more about the opening of the Museum of the Mind in early 2015.
The Whale: an Exploration- National Maritime Museum – 20th September
A unique day-long event of celebration and investigation funded by a Small Arts Award, navigating the fluctuating human relationship with one of the ocean’s most remarkable and threatened creatures. Philip Hoare (Leviathan, The Sea Inside), sound-recordist and composer Chris Watson (Life, Frozen Planet), former whaler and Greenpeace activist John Burton, Mark Carnall (Grant Museum, UCL) and other leading scientists join acclaimed artist filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland for a multi-faceted voyage into the extraordinary world of the whale.
Medicine Unboxed – Parabola Arts Centre, Cheltenham – 22nd-23rd November
This annual conference to inspire debate and cultural change in medicine, sessions will explore human life and consciousness within the world of other life and lives, and our shared human matter and frailty.
The Thing Is… Morbid Anatomy – Wellcome Collection – 7pm-8pm, 25th September
Joanna Ebenstein, Creative Director of the Morbid Anatomy Museum, unravels the paradoxes that encircle early anatomical objects: life and death, science and art, animate and inanimate. (Audio description supported.)
Performances
The Russian Doctor – Birmingham Rep – 10th-13th September
In 1890, Anthon Chekhov journeyed alone for three months across 3,000 miles of Siberian wilderness to make good on his commitment to medicine, to document the harrowing living conditions of the exiles and convicts incarcerated on the remote Tsarist penal colony of Sakhalin Island. This theatre performance, funded through the Large Arts Awards, tells his story.
Lost in the Neuron Forest – 10th October-1st November
Supported by a People Award, this show is a story about memory and how it defines us, and an exploration into what becomes of us when our memories are gone. What begins as an interactive lecture on the science of the brain becomes a personal story of one woman’s struggle to hold onto who she is. Performances start on 10th October at the Southwark Playhouse, then tours to various venues around the UK.
Lost in the Neuron Forest
Exhibitions
Investment – Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool – 27th September-27th October
Tabitha Moses’ new exhibition, ‘Investment’, is based on her experience of infertility, assisted conception, and successful donor egg IVF. It will be accompanied by a publication, programme of talks, discussion group comprising artist-parents, a gallery-based family activity and a series of creative workshops with users of The Hewitt Fertility Centre (Liverpool Women’s Hospital).
Voice Trunk – Winchester Science Centre
The Voice Trunk is a beautiful, midnight-blue, touchable sculpture which invites you to make vocal sound. You can sculpt that sound: twist and shape it with your hands and fingers. You can make a little composition. Alone or with up to four others, you can play and echo and shift and squeak it. The Voice Trunk takes visitors on a journey through what their voices can do, while helping them reflect on the human vocal body, sound and communication.
Unravelled – Wellcome Collection, Studio Windows – 2nd-21st September
What do we remember, how do we remember it, and what prompts us to remember it? Taking place in the Studio windows, this project, led by artist Sarah Carne, is a collaboration between art and psychology students at St Marylebone School.
Eye Contact – Wellcome Trust Windows, London – until 2015
The Wellcome Trust Window Commission hosted a competition to design a display that responded to the changing perception of images. On show in the large windows of the Wellcome Trust building on Euston Road, ‘Eye Contact’ – a winning entry by Peter Hudson – responds to our ever-increasing reliance on the screen for human communication.
An Idiosyncratic A to Z of the Human Condition – Wellcome Collection, London – until 12thOctober
From Acts of Faith to Zoonoses, we present An Idiosyncratic A to Z of the Human Condition. Using Henry Wellcome’s strange and wonderful collection of objects (from medical artefacts and paintings to photography and sculpture), we invite you to consider: what is the human condition?
This free exhibition warmly invites visitor interaction – leave your own human traces in the gallery itself or in the virtual world: On Twitter or Instagram by tagging with #HumanCondition
Online
The Great War: The People’s Story – ITVplayer (before end of September)
If you’re quick, you can still catch the entire series that marks the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, on ITVplayer. The programmes have an underlying focus on the medical innovations triggered by the demands of wartime casualties during the first world war.
Credit: Bill McConkey, Wellcome Images
Body of Songs
A collection of ten songs by some of the UK’s most talented artists, inspired by the body’s organs. Each artist explores an organ with the help of experts, to find out how it works and unlock its mysteries and myths. Along the way they ask profound questions about their own lives; about illness and disease, and age and suffering. Artists include Bat for Lashes, Goldie, and Ghostpoet.
Colliding Worlds
Wellcome Collection recently hosted ‘Colliding Worlds’, an event exploring the extraordinary research of Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, in the thought-provoking context of a conversation with curator and art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist. From astronomy and ecological disaster to science fiction and advice to young scientists, watch the exchange online and download the transcript.
Wellcome Trust Research Round-up: 1/9/14
Our fortnightly round-up of news from the Wellcome Trust research community…
Genes linked to development of glaucoma
A new study funded by the Wellcome Trust and Fight for Sight has identified four new gene locations associated with glaucoma, an eye condition that can lead to blindness and visual impairment. It is hoped the finding could lead to earlier diagnosis and new therapies for treating the condition.
Glaucoma is the leading cause of irreversible blindness in the world. It is caused by damage to the optic nerve, usually due to the eye pressure inside the eye (intraocular pressure) being too high because eye fluid does not drain properly.
In the study published in Nature Genetics, researchers carried out a meta-analysis of more than 35,000 people from seven countries, including subjects of Asian and European descent, with data drawn from the International Glaucoma Genetics Consortium (IGGC).
A site on the ABO gene, which determines blood group, is one of the locations identified, and higher eye pressure appears to be linked to blood group B.
The study also found that a genetic change in the ABCA1 gene is associated with an increased risk of developing both high inner eye pressure and glaucoma. ABCA1 is a major regulator of cellular cholesterol and lipid levels, although further research is required to understand how this mechanism works in the eye.
Early diagnosis of glaucoma is crucial because if it is treated early enough, damage to vision can be prevented. In future it may be possible to provide intensive screening to those identified as being at higher genetic risk.
Professor Chris Hammond from the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London, who directed the study, said: “Although eye drops are already available to treat glaucoma, these are not always effective. These findings help us to understand why some people get glaucoma and explain why the condition tends to run in families.”
Male fruit flies’ chemical demand for monogamy
A new study in The Journal of Cell Biology provides an insight into how male fruit flies
improve their reproductive success by stopping females from mating with other flies.
In addition to sperm, semen carries products that foster sperm survival, promote egg fertilization, and serve other functions that optimise a male’s chances of passing along his genes.
In male fruit flies’, reproductive accessory glands (thought to be equivalent to the prostate gland in humans) secrete signalling chemicals into the seminal fluid that make the recipient females less inclined to mate again with other flies.
But it’s unclear how some of these signalling chemicals are produced and delivered in order to reprogram a female’s behaviour against her own self-interest. Researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust have identified tiny membrane-bound vesicles called exosomes that are secreted into the seminal fluid by the so-called “secondary cells” of male accessory glands.
The authors showed that, after mating, the exosomes fuse with sperm and interact with cells along the female reproductive tract.
When the researchers reduced the number of exosomes produced by secondary cells, the female flies were more inclined to re-mate. This indicates that the exosomes are responsible for the behavioural changes, by interacting with the targeted female cells to overpower normal signalling pathways.
Puberty in girls influenced by one parent more than the other
The age at which girls reach sexual maturity is influenced by ‘imprinted’ genes, a small sub-set of genes whose activity differs depending on which parent passes on that gene, according to new research published today in the journal Nature.
The findings come from an international study of more than 180,000 women involving scientists from 166 institutions worldwide. The researchers identified 123 genetic variations that were associated with the timing of when girls experienced their first menstrual cycle, by analysing the DNA of 182,416 women of European descent from 57 studies. Six of these variants were found to be clustered within imprinted regions of the genome.
Lead author Dr John Perry, a Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge said, “Normally, our inherited physical characteristics reflect a roughly average combination of our parents’ genomes, but imprinted genes place unequal weight on the influence of either the mother’s or the father’s genes. Our findings imply that in a family, one parent may more profoundly affect puberty timing in their daughters than the other parent.”
The activity of imprinted genes differs depending on which parent the gene is inherited from – some genes are only active when inherited from the mother, others are only active when inherited from the father. Both types of imprinted genes were identified as determining puberty timing in girls, indicating a possible biological conflict between the parents over their child’s rate of development.
Further evidence for the parental imbalance in inheritance patterns was obtained by analysing the association between these imprinted genes and timing of puberty in a study of over 35,000 women in Iceland, for whom detailed information on their family trees were available.
In other news…
Congratulations to Professor Rob Klose who has been awarded the Royal Society Francis Crick Lecture for his research into how chromatin-based, and epigenetic processes, contribute to gene regulation. Professor Klose has been supported throughout his career by the Wellcome Trust, beginning with his PhD studentship.
Another Wellcome Trust-funded PhD student, Dr Jenny Bangham, has won the Marc-Auguste Pictet Prize for her dissertation “Blood groups and the rise of human genetics in mid-twentieth century Britain”. The prize is given out every other year by the Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle de Genève on a different theme pertaining to the history of science.
Image credits: Testing for Glaucoma – Libby Welch, Wellcome Images, Drosophila melanogaster mating – ImageEditor on Flickr, CC-BY 2.0, Teenage girls – Anthea Sieveking , Wellcome Images
Image of the week: Ebola
This week’s image is of a sculpture of the Ebola virus, created by artist Luke Jerram.
It is an unusual, and artistic, take on Ebola. With the virus continuing to spread in West Africa and the responses from the global health community regularly in the news, we’ve found that journalists and health writers have been requesting images of the virus, but they are not easy to come by.
Made entirely of glass, Luke’s sculpture is approximately one million times larger than the virus itself, and is part of a series of similar glass-works called Glass Microbiology.
All the pieces in this series are transparent and colourless, in deliberate contrast to artificially coloured scientific images. Being smaller than the wavelength of light, viruses in fact have no colour. To create the series, Luke worked in consultation with virologists from the University of Bristol, and photographs of his work have been used in medical journals, media stories, and one has even appeared on the front cover of Nature.
Not only is this a precise visual representation of Ebola, its jewel-like finish carries great beauty. This complex tension between the beauty of an object and what it represents lies at the heart of Luke’s sculptures, which have been created as a means of contemplating the global impact of disease.
This particular artwork was commissioned by a museum in Holland last year, but will be on display in the redeveloped Reading Room at Wellcome Collection in 2015.
Image Credit: Luke Jerram
Earlier this year the Wellcome Trust and New Statesman announced a joint programme offering paid internships to aspiring science writers from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. The recipients of the first two scholarships spent eight weeks working at New Statesman. Ajit Niranjan, tells us about the experience…
This summer I worked as a science writer for the New Statesman, a weekly British magazine that is famous for its progressive take on politics, arts and current affairs. I had a Wellcome Trust scholarship that enabled me to complete an internship programme for aspiring science writers at the magazine.
In an attempt to combat the lack of diversity in science journalism, the placement is only open to students and graduates from ethnic minorities. I know this doesn’t sit well with many people – I certainly wrestled with the idea of accepting any form of positive discrimination – but if you’re an eligible candidate I’d strongly urge you to apply. Schemes like this are essential to levelling the playing field.
I joined the online team at the start of June and was thrown straight into the deep end, writing four articles in my first week and conducting phone interviews with researchers in the UK and abroad. Essentially, I was given the same level of independence as the rest of the staff. My day-to-day role was finding interesting developments from press releases or the news, find a ‘science-y’ angle (there usually is one) and write a blog post that a school child would be able to understand.
It’s a simple formula that works pretty well. Every article was edited before going up online and so I got feedback on my writing on a daily basis.
During the two-month placement I learned a great deal – not just about writing and journalism, but also about areas of science I’d never studied before. The scope is huge. Topics that fell under my remit as a science writer ranged from opinion pieces on drugs policy to reporting on the latest gadgets in the tech world – which even saw me trying Google Glass when it first launched in the UK.
Alongside the regular short blog posts, I did a couple of longer pieces including a 3000-word essay on China’s growing environmental issues. Having the New Statesman’s name behind me meant I could confidently approach important figures for interviews, including CEOs of tech companies and even my local MP (and scientist) Julian Huppert.
Outside of the regular writing, New Statesman kept me busy. I attended all the editorial meetings, spoke on the weekly podcast about science and technology, and joined the political editor on a trip to Westminster for Prime Minister’s Questions.
Best of all, I was allowed to pitch ideas for publication in the printed magazine’s Observations section. The work was always varied and the perks – including free tickets to New Statesman events including a Laurie Penny/Mary Beard debate and the incredible Latitude festival – just added to the excitement of working in London.
The staff at New Statesman invested time in training the interns up. Helen Lewis, the deputy editor, set us a challenge popular in journalism schools, to give us some reporting practice – to take the Tube out to a nearby station and cover a local story on the ground in a single afternoon. A daunting task, but well worth it for the feedback we received.
Mainstream media, more so than any other profession, really suffers from its artificially homogeneous make-up and ethnicity is just one area that is disproportionately represented in what is overwhelmingly an old boys’ club. The Wellcome Trust Scholarship provides an imperfect solution to a very serious problem of a lack of diversity in journalism. It’s a tricky issue for a number of reasons but I strongly recommend checking out this piece by ex-New Statesman writer Rafael Behr for a bit of background.
There’s a lot you can get out of the placement if you choose to apply, and the application process itself is pretty straightforward – simply write an 800-word blog post on a recent scientific development. My advice is to choose a topic you’re genuinely interested in.
Working at the New Statesman this summer was hugely educational and I’m now very set on pursuing a career in journalism. If you’re thinking of applying in future I’d be happy to answer your questions on Twitter.
You can read Ajit’s articles on the New Statesman website and follow him on Twitter as @NiranjanAjit. The Wellcome Trust is committed to supporting a new generation of science journalists – find our more in this blog post.
Researcher Spotlight: Dr Faith Osier
Dr Faith Hope Among’in Osier is a Clinical Research Fellow and Group leader at the KEMRI-Wellcome Research Institute in Kenya. She holds a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Fellowship in Public Health and Tropical Medicine and was recently awarded the Royal Society Pfizer Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes for African science. Here, Dr Osier shares her passion for research on the mechanisms of developing immunity to malaria, especially in children…
What are you working on?
I try to understand how adults in Africa learn to live in harmony with the parasite responsible for malaria, such that infections do not make them ill. This knowledge could help us design vaccines that would protect children, who can die as a result of a malaria infection.
What does your average day involve?
My average day has evolved over the years as I have graduated from being a junior to a more senior researcher. Earlier on, I’d spend a lot of time in the laboratory generating data and less time in the office – reading scientific literature, analysing data and writing up my work.
More recently, I spend most of my time in the office, still reading, analysing data and writing research grants and papers. Importantly I meet with my students and research assistants to discuss their work. I also spend at least one to two hours each day on administrative issues and/or academic meetings within my department.
Why is your work important?
Malaria still claims the lives of hundreds of thousands of children each year and has a major economic impact on the lives of many in sub-Saharan Africa. Children that survive severe malaria can be left with permanent physical disability that takes many forms. It’s really important that we find ways to control and eventually eliminate malaria for the health and economic empowerment of Africa.
Children in Kilifi county, Kenya present to a local dispensary for testing (Photo credit: Juliana Wambua)
What do you hope the impact of your work will be?
My dream is that I can contribute to “making malaria history” through effective vaccination.
Imagine a world where young babies and infants are vaccinated for malaria in rural clinics, alongside other vaccines in the Expanded Programme for Immunisation. I’d love to see this happen, children getting vaccinated and having the opportunity to live, improve their lives and those of their communities.
How did you come to be working on this topic/in this field?
I joined the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in 1998 as a junior doctor and was interested in training in paediatrics. It was here that I was introduced to research on malaria in general, and begun to understand that we know so little about this disease that has been with humans for such a long time.
I met a vibrant team of enthusiastic researchers, and this really drew me in. Before I joined the immunology research team, I would joke that the immunologists asked the same question about malaria over and over again, and did not seem to get any wiser. Now that joke is on me, and I appreciate better why it is that we still do not understand how humans become immune to malaria.
How has Wellcome funding helped you/your research/your career?
The Wellcome Trust has been instrumental to getting me established as a credible African research scientist. I competed and won a training fellowship that supported my PhD studies. My current work is supported by an intermediate fellowship, and this has enabled me to compete successfully for an MRC/DFID African Research Leader award.
Research mentorship Kilifi style!
The Wellcome Trust also supported (and continues to support) other brilliant researchers, who have mentored me in different ways and contributed significantly to my development.
Funding from the Trust has also allowed me to mentor and train younger researchers and I have a research team that I am really proud of! I commend the Trust for their international portfolio, for opening up funding opportunities for researchers for tropical and developing countries. Without this, I doubt that I would have taken up a career in research.
What’s the most frequently asked question about your work?
When will we have a malaria vaccine?
Faith Osier and Gathoni Kamuyu doing malaria antibody testing in the lab. (Photo credit: Brett Lowe)
Which question about your work do you most dread – and why?
Why is it that after so many years we still do not have a malaria vaccine? What are you researchers doing?
This question often comes from laymen – and it is challenging to explain in lay language why basic science research takes time, and why we must remain nevertheless optimistic!
Tell us something about you that might surprise us…
I love international rugby matches and am a strong supporter of our Kenya Sevens Team
What keeps you awake at night?
The fact that people are developing immunity to malaria all around me – I feel that this process is staring me in the face- if you like, and I must be able to see and understand how it is happening.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?
It’s a funny statement but I think its true… “Life is not a rehearsal, LIVE IT!”
The ‘chain reaction’ question, set by Prof Scott Waddell is this: “If you were able to start again, what would you rather work on? Or do?”
If I could start again, I’d still work on malaria…it is a fascinating disease.
You can find out more about Dr Osier and her research on the KEMRI-Wellcome website.
Each year, the Wellcome Trust offers a number of paid summer internships at Trust HQ. These are aimed at giving current undergraduates the chance to experience working an area of the Trust that interests them, and we hope to inspire, support and develop the next generation of people who can make a difference.
As the eight-week placements of the 2014 cohort of interns come to an end, we caught up with some of them to find out what they most enjoyed about being at the Trust, and what advice they have for future applicants…
The top 10 things about working at the Wellcome Trust
- The diversity of people – their careers, backgrounds, and skills – and the diversity of the work done that is done here
- The friendliness and atmosphere – “Everyone is super friendly & helpful– from the staff in the kitchen to Jeremy Farrar”
- The food! Cheap, tasty, healthy food
- The glass lifts – and the chats you have in them
- The sense of improving the world and being able to see real outcomes of your work
- The opportunity to learn outside your field
- Working alongside the greatest minds (someone’s been reading our vision statement!)
- The free gym
- The free tea and coffee (and hot-chocolate)
- The great views from the upper floors of the building
Even though they’ve only been with us for eight weeks, it seems like this bright bunch of interns have already found many of the things that make working at the Wellcome Trust so enjoyable. But what will they take away from the experience?
The Internship Experience
Eloisa Tovee, Legal Intern
“Eight weeks interning at the Wellcome Trust is a substantial amount of time and has been the origin of an amazing learning curve. Over the summer internship I have developed communication skills, gained experience in legal writing and negotiation and more importantly, learnt to think outside the box.”
Kate Taylor – 2014 SPPU Evaluation Intern
Kate Taylor
Strategic Planning and Policy Unit – Evaluation Intern
“I’ve learned that most people change careers and move about quite a lot – it’s okay not to know exactly what you want to do as that will probably change anyway throughout your life! I’ve also learnt how to handle many different projects at the same time, and to always provide updates and feedback to your supervisors.”
Jamie Gore, Marketing Communications Intern
“I’ve learned all about the different tasks that come under the umbrella term ‘Marketing’, I’ve improved a number of my skills Excel for example) and learned that the Trust gets involved with much more than just medical research.”
Bethany Summers, Science Intern
“I’ve learnt more about what the Wellcome Trust does and from that been able to complete a whole project complete with presentation to the division in only 8 weeks! My newfound Excel skills are certainly a bonus and I’m geekily excited about being able to use them in my final year of university. I must credit the Neuroscience and Mental Health team in Science for all their support and including me as one of the ‘family’.”
Sophie Ward, Education and Learning Intern
“I’ve learnt a lot of transferrable skills to take back to university with me next year, including research/report writing skills. I’ve also had the chance to listen to a funding committee, which gave me lots of things to think about when completing application forms in the future.”
Meesha Patel – Broadcast, Games and Film Intern
“One of the main and most important things I have learnt from my experience here is that you shouldn’t plan too far ahead. As long as you have a general idea of where you are going and you have ambition, you are helping yourself along the way by getting involved with projects that interest you. Your plan isn’t set in stone. It has got to be fluid – as most things are in life.”
Advice for future applicants
Ben Stockton – 2014 Intern in the Editorial team
We asked what advice they would give people who are considering applying for the Wellcome Trust internship scheme in future. Lots of good advice came back – including these top tips:
Go for it!
“You would need a very good reason not to apply!” says Eloisa Tovee. “The opportunities to network, gain experience in what interests you, develop personal skills and transferrable career skills are boundless. It is the perfect place to spend eight weeks learning!”
It’s not just for science students
“As a non-science student I nearly let this put me off applying” says Sophie Ward. “I thought that I wouldn’t have much of a chance, however it turns out that this isn’t true! Just make sure you can show a real interest in the role you are applying for and can articulate why you want to work here.”
Be Passionate
Meesha Patel shares her advice on producing a good application “Show how passionate you are” she says. “Interest and dedication really shines through in an application or in an interview and being able to convey that will help you a great deal.”
Be yourself
“Don’t try to fit the model of a ‘perfect applicant’” says Ben Stockton, “there’s no set career path needed to work here.” Jamie Gore agrees, “being a little bit different helps you stand out, I did my interview on Skype from a hostel in Morocco in harem pants and I think that made me stand out somewhat” he says.
Learn about the Trust
“I would highly recommend developing an understanding of the uniqueness of the Trust and an appreciation for how influential and important its role is in the scientific community” says Gore.
Ask questions
If you’re successful, then Kate Taylor has this advice for getting the most out of the experience: “Don’t be afraid to ask questions or speak up when you don’t know something. People are really friendly here and willing to help.”
We’d like to thank all of our 21 summer interns for their hard work this summer. They’ve worked on projects and initiatives too numerous to count within every department in the Trust, and contributed greatly to our work. A final word from the Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar “From all of us: thank you, goodbye and remember to stay in touch!”
If you’re interested in applying for a summer internship next year, be sure to keep an eye on the internship section of the Wellcome Trust website. We also run a graduate development scheme and offer a range of funding options, including Biomedical Vacation Scholarships.
Image of the Week: Xenopus
Move over Paul the Octopus, this friendly looking creature can tell if you’re pregnant or not…
.. well, sort of. This week’s image is of a Xenopus, a type of aquatic frog native to southern Africa, which was used in pregnancy testing.
In the 1930s it was discovered that injecting a woman’s urine into a live female Xenopus could test if the woman was pregnant. If the urine contained the pregnancy hormone human chorionic gonadotropin, it prompted the female frog to ovulate, so if the frog laid eggs, it was confirmation of pregnancy.
Between the 1940s and 1960s, it was common practice in the UK to send urine samples to pregnancy-testing laboratories where this test was performed.
Xenopus, more commonly known as the African clawed frog, has slippery smooth skin, the result of a mucus antibiotic coating, which results in incredible healing properties for the frog. The back legs are webbed making them powerful swimmers, a handy attribute when you spend pretty much all of your time in the water.
No longer used as a living pregnancy test, these frogs can still be found in life science laboratories around the world. Xenopus leavis is used as a model organism and has played an important role in helping scientists better understand developmental biology.
As well as being used in research around the globe, Xenopus has made it into space. Embryos were first taken to the Russian space station Salyut, and further research involved successful fertilisation of eggs in space, and experiments on the International Space Station, where the affect of microgravity on development could be studied.
Image credit: Wellcome Library, London
Wellcome Images is one of the world’s richest and most unusual collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science. Over 100,000 high resolution images from our historical collections are now free to use under the Creative Commons-Attribution only (CC-BY) licence.
Today the Wellcome Trust has announced a multi-million pound funding package to support research during the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa. There’s no sign of an end to the outbreak and many people believe things will get worse before they get better, so it’s important to understand the scale of the challenge we face. Oliver Brady is an epidemiologist from the University of Oxford, who has been working in this area with colleagues Professor Simon Hay and Dr Peter Horby. Here, he explains why this outbreak requires special attention…
Last week a World Health Organisation (WHO) Expert Committee reached the conclusion that it would be ethical to consider unproven drugs during this exceptional Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
This ground-breaking decision raises some immediate questions: what investigational drugs and vaccines are available, and what volume of each would be required in the current epidemic?
Rapid answers to these questions are necessary in order to plan the development of any of the candidate drugs or vaccines, for this, and future outbreaks.
Prof Simon Hay, Dr Peter Horby and I have spent some time looking at how we might come up with some figures to provide a useful starting point for discussions. It is important to note that it is not our intention to provide exact figures, but rather to enable us to judge the potential need in an epidemic of this scale, compared to previous outbreaks.
To reach these estimates we extracted a range of published data from 22 previous outbreaks of Ebola spanning back to 1976. This data includes contact-tracing studies and staffing needs during the outbreaks, which allowed us to approximate the number of people that may have been exposed to the Ebola virus per infected person or per bed.
We created four different categories to reflect the different groups potentially exposed to Ebola virus. These categories are: Ebola patients and their close contacts, healthcare providers and those who dispose of the bodies and infectious material, other essential service providers including logistics personnel and a contingency stockpile for controlling infections that spread outside West Africa.
By estimating the numbers of people in each of these categories who might be exposed to infectious individuals, we were able to work out how many people could have been eligible for treatment or vaccination over the course of the outbreak so far.
While the people in these different categories may be at very different levels of risk for developing the disease, until we have a better understanding exactly what constitutes a significant contact we have to assume that all of these individuals may require treatment or prophylaxis.
Our results show that, under a conservative scenario, up to 30,000 people may have been eligible for treatment or vaccination between the start of the current epidemic in December 2013 and 19th August 2014.
This scenario is considered conservative as it is based on data from past Ebola epidemics in isolated rural communities. The difference in scale of the current urban outbreak means that many of these historical parameters may be underestimates.
It is clear that the magnitude of need for the current on-going epidemic is already significantly higher than any previous Ebola outbreaks. Furthermore we are seeing no signs of the epidemic easing and action is urgently required given the considerable gap between need and the tools we currently have available.
The next step is for those involved in manufacturing or commissioning potential therapies to refine our initial estimates, taking into account the specific therapeutic or preventive characteristics of each drug or vaccine. The financing and roll-out of investigational drugs will also have an effect on the number of treatments required, but we hope that the groundwork that we have put in will assist in this process.
Mathematical models of the epidemic will also be important in refining the numbers and helping to determine the optimum intervention scenarios when the effectiveness and modes of action of the candidates are known.
The scale of the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa means that we have no time to waste. Now is the time for decisions to be made on financing, scaling up production and evaluating investigational and novel Ebola therapeutics.
Our preliminary estimates of the number of people that might have been eligible for treatment or vaccination since the start of this outbreak, if the products were available, gives us an a better idea of the scale of the challenge we face.
We hope that our tool will facilitate prompt, evidence-based decisions on the scale of financing and manufacturing required for these potential therapeutics and vaccines.
Made now, these decisions may have the capacity to mitigate the mortality and improve the control of the current Ebola outbreak, as well as those that may occur in the future.
You can read Oliver Brady’s article on Nature.com in their ‘World View’ section and find the spreadsheet they used for calculating the number here. Oliver Brady (BBSRC funded) and Prof Simon Hay (Wellcome Trust funded) are in the Spatial Ecology and Epidemiology Group, University of Oxford, and Dr Peter Horby is from the Epidemic Diseases Research Group, Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, also at the University of Oxford.
The Wellcome Trust has announced new funding to support research that could take place during the current Ebola outbreak and in future epidemics. More information can be found in the news section of the Wellcome Trust website.
Image credits: Ebola virus – CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith/Public Health Image Library, Vaccination – Barbara Bellingham, Wellcome Images
Enhancing the discoverability of public health and epidemiology research data is a key to ensuring that it gets more widely used. This was the topic of a recent workshop hosted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where researchers and data experts explored the findings of a recent Wellcome Trust report on data discoverability. Dave Carr, Policy Adviser at the Wellcome Trust, highlights some of the key themes that emerged from a lively and productive debate.
The Wellcome Trust is committed to ensuring that the data outputs generated by the research we fund can be accessed and used in a way that maximises the health and societal benefit. We are a member of the Public Health Research Data Forum, which brings together a consortium of like-minded funding global funders with a shared vision of increasing the availability of health research data, in ways that are equitable, ethical and efficient.
While some research disciplines have well-established community-level resources that store and curate datasets and make these available to potential users, this type of infrastructure has been much slower to develop in other fields.
For public health and epidemiology research, the vast and rich datasets collected from human populations in the course of research are often held locally by the groups that have gathered the data. In many cases, there is no easy way for potential users to find out whether a particular dataset exists, let alone to gain access to the data in a useable form. This severely limits the potential value that may be derived.
The need to make data more readily discoverable to users is widely recognised as one of the fundamental barriers to more effective data sharing. On behalf of the Public Health Research Data Forum, the Wellcome Trust commissioned an expert team to explore how the public health and epidemiology field could best take on this challenge. Their report was published in July 2014.
The workshop gave participants the opportunity to discuss the team’s findings with a panel of invited experts – including Arofan Gregory of the Open Data Foundation, Steve Kern of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, David Leon of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Brian Hole of Ubiquity Press, and Matthew Wollard of the UK Data Service. The panel discussion was chaired by Jimmy Whitworth, Head of Population Sciences at the Wellcome Trust.
One of the important messages was that making data discoverable is certainly not an impossible challenge. The required technology already exists and successful approaches have been applied in related fields (such as the social sciences). These could be built upon and adapted to provide workable solutions for public health and epidemiology research data.
Panellists and delegates highlighted several pioneering initiatives that are already widening access to research datasets. But the picture that currently exists is a fragmented one, with a lack of overarching community standards and agreed best practice across the piece. A key challenge for any initiative to enhance data discoverability would therefore be linking up existing initiatives and effectively building on what is already in place.
Two other messages emerged very strongly from the discussion. Firstly, that data usability is at least as big a challenge as discoverability, and as it is inextricably linked, cannot be ignored.
The adoption of robust approaches for collecting adequate metadata is critical for both discoverability and usability. Metadata must be gathered as the research is conducted (and not added in as an afterthought).
Secondly, in order to encourage researchers to put in the effort required to make their data discoverable and useable, appropriate incentive structures must exist. This point resonates strongly with the findings of a report of Expert Advisory Group on Data Access on incentives and culture change for data sharing that was published earlier this year.
In building support in the research community, it was emphasised that the principal argument must always be that enhancing the discoverability and usability of data enables better science.
Over the weeks ahead the Trust and our partners in the Forum will crystallise plans for taking forward the report’s recommendations. We are committed to ensuring we progress in a way that best meets the community’s needs, and want the issues to be discussed and debated as widely as possible. This workshop provided an excellent first step in this progress, and we would welcome your further feedback and comments.
The workshop was filmed and is available to view on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Vimeo Channel. The report, “Enhancing Discoverability of Public Health and Epidemiology Research Data” is available from the Public Health Research Data Forum site.
Image credit: Lederle Laboratory - G. Terry Sharrer, Ph.d. National Museum Of American History/NIH, Carrot on a string – by nist6dh on Flickr CC-BY-SA
Wellcome Trust Research Round-Up: 18/08/14
Our fortnightly round-up up of news from the Wellcome Trust research community…
Mind and body: link between immune system and mental health
The immune system may have a role to play in mental illness, suggests research from the University of Cambridge, published in JAMA Psychiatry last week.
With funding from the Trust, as well as the NIHR and the MRC, the team from Cambridge carried out the first ever longitudinal study to examine the link between inflammatory markers, such as the protein interleukin-6 (IL-6), in childhood and subsequent mental illness.
They took blood samples from 4,500 individuals (from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, or Children of the 90s), at age 9 and followed up at age 18 to see if they had experienced episodes of depression or psychosis. They found that those participants whose levels of IL-6 were deemed ‘high’ when children were nearly twice as likely to have experienced such episodes later in life, than those whose levels were ‘low’.
Dr Golam Khandaker from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, who led the study, says: “Our immune system acts like a thermostat, turned down low most of the time, but cranked up when we have an infection. In some people, the thermostat is always set slightly higher, behaving as if they have a persistent low-level infection – these people appear to be at a higher risk of developing depression and psychosis.
It’s too early to say whether this association is causal, and we are carrying out additional studies to examine this association further.”
The study indicates that chronic physical illness such as coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes may share a common mechanism with mental illness. People with depression and schizophrenia are known to have a much higher risk of developing heart disease and diabetes, and elevated levels of IL-6 have previously been shown to increase the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. The research also hints at interesting ways of potentially treating illnesses such as depression with anti-inflammatory drugs.
Momentary subjective well-being: an equation to predict happiness 
Researchers from University College London, including one of the team behind the Great Brain Experiment, have developed an equation to predict how happy people will say they are from moment to moment, based on recent events relating to rewards and expectations.
26 subjects completed a decision-making task where they either lost or gained money, while answering the question: ‘how happy are you right now?’
The participants’ neural activity was measured throughout using fMRI, and this data was used to develop one of the games in the Great Brain Experiment app, called ‘What makes me happy?’ Data from a subsequent 18,420 players found that the same equation could be used to predict their happiness, even though they were only winning points and not money.
Lead author of the study, Dr Robb Rutledge from the UCL Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging and the new Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing, commented: “It is often said that you will be happier if your expectations are lower…The new equation captures these different effects of expectations and allows happiness to be predicted based on the combined effects of many past events”.
With the data from players of the smartphone app fitting the same equation as the smaller lab-based experiments, the team are optimistic about the app’s potential to produce robust results. “It demonstrates the tremendous value of this approach for studying human well-being on a large scale,” said Dr Rutledge.
The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was reported widely by outlets including the BBC and the Telegraph.
Toxic proteins implicated in brain diseases
A specific genetic mutation may damage nerve cells in frontotemporal dementia and motor neurone disease, suggesting a potential new target for treating the two brain diseases.
Scientists at UCL and the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing used fruit flies to better understand the effects of the C9orf72 gene, which has been linked to both frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and motor neurone disease. A faulty version of the C9orf72 gene was recently shown to cause both diseases, and is thought to be responsible for roughly 8% of all cases of each in the UK.
The faulty gene contains a short section of genetic code that is repeated thousands of times. This repeated code results in extra molecules called RNA, as well as repeated fragments of protein, and the challenge has been to uncover whether the RNA or the protein – or both – may be harmful to nerve cells. By ‘cloning’ sections of DNA to test separately, the team were able to identify that toxic protein fragments are the main culprit in causing brain cell death in both diseases.
Dr Brian Dickie, Director of Research Development at the Motor Neurone Disease Association, said:
“Since the discovery of C9orf72 in 2011, researchers have been continually trying to understand how this gene causes both motor neurone disease and FTD. This detailed and elegant research has given us an important insight into how C9orf72 causes disease, which will guide the MND and FTD research communities in their efforts to develop new approaches to treatment.”
This work was funded by the Trust, alongside Alzheimer’s Research UK, the Motor Neurone Disease Association and the MRC. The paper is published in the journal Science.
In other news…
- Researchers at the University of Reading have provided new understanding into how our brain processes information to change how we view the world. Using a simple 3D computer game (not un-like Pong) they found that the brain uses an internal simulation of the laws of physics to change its perception of slant in order to ‘score’ consistently. The Wellcome Trust and EPSRC funded study, Humans Use Predictive Kinematic Models to Calibrate Visual Cues to Three-Dimensional Surface Slant, is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
- A study published in Nature Communications has found that new-born babies generate a genetic code to indicate whether or not a bacterial infection is present in the bloodstream; an infection distress signal. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh have identified a signal consisting of 52 molecular characters specific to bacterial infection, likening it to a ‘biological tweet’.
- Researchers from the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kenya and Imperial College have published the results from a pilot randomized controlled trial looking at the effects of Mesalazine in malnourished children. The study is available on BioMed Central and is part of their series on Medicine for Global Health.
- Congratulations to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology, Institute of Infection Immunity and Inflammation for being shortlisted in the Excellence in Communication category of the Glasgow Business Awards.
Image of the Week: Wiring of the human brain
Spark the imagination… submit your images for the 2015 Wellcome Image Awards now! If you are a research scientist, photographer or illustrator, your images could reach a global audience. The winning images will go on display at science centres and public galleries across the UK. We are looking for high quality imagery that relates to biomedical science and contemporary healthcare, and are interested in all artistic media and imaging techniques, from hand-drawn illustrations to super-resolution microscopy and functional MRI scans. Any images we receive before 30 September 2014 will be considered for the Wellcome Image Awards 2015. Email Sabrina Taner for more information about this.
To inspire you, this week’s image focuses on one of the 2014 Award winners, a bird’s-eye view of nerve fibres in a normal, healthy adult human brain. The back of the brain is on the left of the image and the left side of the brain is at the top of the image. Brain cells communicate with each other through these nerve fibres, which have been visualised by diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI MRI). Diffusion-weighted imaging is a specialised type of MRI scan; here it is measuring the movement of water in many directions in order to reconstruct the orientation of the nerve fibres. As this is a 3D image the direction of the nerve fibres has been colour-coded. Fibres travelling up and down (between the top of the head and the neck) are coloured blue, fibres travelling forwards and backwards (between the face and back of the head) are coloured green, and fibres travelling left and right (between the ears) are coloured red.
This image was taken by Zeynep Saygin, a postdoctoral fellow at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Zeynep’s work focuses on understanding how different regions in the brain work together to process information and how this changes in people as they develop or in those with dyslexia. She said “I am continually astounded by the sheer number and complexity of the nerve fibres of the human brain, this image only shows a small portion of its neuronal connections. There is something utterly provocative and powerful about seeing the physical architecture that makes up the human mind.”
This year, for the first time, the Wellcome Image Awards went on display simultaneously in all four countries of the UK: at the Glasgow Science Centre, the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Manchester, Techniquest in Cardiff and W5 in Belfast. In 2015 the winning images will go on display in simultaneous exhibitions at even more science centres and public galleries across the UK.
Image credit: Zeynep M. Saygin, McGovern Institute, MIT/Wellcome Images
Wellcome Images is one of the world’s richest and most unusual collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science. All our images are available in digital form so please click the link above if you would like to use the picture that features in this post, or to quickly find related ones. Many are free to use non-commercially under the terms of a Creative Commons licence and full details of the specific licence for each image are provided.
Researcher Spotlight: Professor Scott Waddell
Professor Scott Waddell (Credit: Wellcome Images)
Professor Scott Waddell is a Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Oxford and a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. Scott studied biochemistry as an undergraduate and completed a PhD in cancer biology before taking a leap across the atlantic and in to the field of neuroscience for his post-doctoral research. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spent 10 years leading a research group at the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. We talked to Scott about his current research and what drew him to neuroscience.
What are you working on?
We work on many things. How and where are memories formed? Why do some memories last a lifetime and others are transient? How are memories retrieved so that you can use them when they are needed? Recently we have also started to work on neural transposition; that is the unexpected alteration of the genome within neurons caused by the somewhat random activity of small pieces of mobile, or ‘jumping’, DNA. Transposition could in principle lead to individual differences in behaviour, sporadic neurological disease and so forth.
What does your average day involve?
Drop off daughter at school, bike to work, check the overnight email, chat to people in the lab getting an update on progress, lab meeting if we have it, lunch with the group, more discussion with lab sucking in the new data, writing mostly in afternoon, check on those doing the most exciting experiments of the day, ride the bike home, run, dinner, family time, write, sleep, repeat.
Why is your work important?
I study the fabric of life and I try to explain where intelligent behaviour comes from. What could be more interesting and important than that?! A better understanding of the brain will likely improve our chances of treating a number of neurological disorders.
What do you hope the impact of your work will be?
I hope our work will help us to understand how the brain works and that it will interest and inspire others.
How did you come to be working on this topic/in this field?
From university onward I was fascinated by research and followed opportunity. My PhD advisor John Jenkins used to irregularly leave photocopied articles on my desk and it was one of those that initiated my switch from cancer biology to neuroscience.
Yeast studies of cell-cycle control and the circadian clockwork in flies tipped me towards using genetics to study memory in Drosophila. From then on I have been lead by the data in front of me; new approaches, my curiosity, the scientific literature and old science books.
A fly brain
How has Wellcome funding helped you/your research/your career?
The Wellcome Trust has been instrumental. They funded my transition from cancer to neuroscience as a postdoctoral fellow in the USA and 15 years later, they facilitated my return. I would still be in the USA without my Senior Research Fellowship. Support from the Trust to myself and the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, allows us to continue to follow the most interesting and difficult avenues of our work in Oxford.
What’s the most frequently asked question about your work?
Why do you work on flies?
Which question about your work do you most dread – and why?
There’s nothing I dread. I think it’s important to think about and explain what we are doing and why.
Tell us something about you that might surprise us…
Hmm, tough choice. There are a few things! How about a brain one? 10 years ago I had a 5cm left frontal lobe bleed.
What keeps you awake at night?
My hectic life-style.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?
To learn to say ‘no’ to some of the many requests for my time.
The chain reaction question, posed by the previous spotlight participant, Dr Nichola Lax, is this: How do you see your career progressing and what would be your ideal post?
Hopefully forward! My current position is pretty good.
You can find out more about Scott and the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour on the Centre’s website or by following Scott on Twitter. You might also like to read Scott’s papers: Transposition-Driven Genomic Heterogeneity in the Drosophila Brain and Layered reward signaling through octopamine and dopamine in Drosophila.
Image of the Week: Grey Drone Fly
This week’s image depicts the head of a drone fly. It is an engraving featured in Robert Hooke’s 1665 publication Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (catchy title).
Although Hooke is more often associated with his contributions to science, the image here demonstrates his remarkable talent as a draftsman.
Hooke’s small lettered annotations remind you that this is, in fact, an anatomical diagram, though this hardly detracts from the intricate detailing in the eyes and surrounding hairs.
Micrographia is an extraordinary book and the first of its kind. It gave the public their first look at the weird and wonderful things that exist beyond the naked eye. After finding a copy in a local bookshop and staying up until 2am reading it, Samuel Pepys declared in his diary that it was ‘the most ingenious book I read in my life’.
Hooke’s own personal story is a fascinating as his illustrations. As a Fellow of the Royal Society, Hooke and Isaac Newton were absorbed in a bitter rivalry. Rumours say that Newton waited until Hooke had died before becoming more active in the Society. However, it may only be coincidence that Newton was elected President in 1703, the year of Hooke’s death.
No contemporary portraits of Hooke remain, any painted after his death have relied on written physical descriptions. Some say that once he had passed away, Newton destroyed all paintings of Hooke, but this is a mystery. Today, he remains a relatively enigmatic figure in history.
Image credit: Wellcome Images
Wellcome Images is one of the world’s richest and most unusual collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science. Over 100,000 high resolution images from our historical collections are now free to use under the Creative Commons-Attribution only (CC-BY) licence.
Keeping open access simple
Piece of cake?
The Wellcome Trust believes that access to the published outputs of research should be open and unrestricted. But, argue Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services at Wellcome Library, and Chris Bird, Senior Legal Counsel for the Wellcome Trust, policies and licences designed to support open access publication must also be easy for researchers to understand and use.
In April 2013 we simplified our open access policy: now, where we pay an open access fee our research must be published under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY). Why did we do this? Because we passionately believe in the power of sharing knowledge, and because CC-BY is the strongest available tool to deliver access to and re-use of our funded research. We also believe that CC-BY has become the globally recognised open access licence. Now, The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) has published a new set of open access licence and is encouraging its publisher members to adopt them: unfortunately, we feel this can only confuse the picture.
The great thing about CC-BY is freedom to re-use, and interoperability with other platforms and technologies. Anyone can re-use CC-BY content without getting permission: all they need to do is give credit to the author.
Under CC-BY, anyone can take an article and translate it to a different language, use text and graphics such as figures and tables in their own presentations or blogs, and use the power of computers to create links and generate new knowledge.
Anyone can post CC-BY content to any web site, including commercial ones, allowing much wider reach. For example, if new research was published which described new approaches to reduce cot death, this could be re-published without permission on Mumsnet and BabyCentre (both highly commercial sites) in order to reach more parents who may not generally search journal web sites or repositories like Europe PMC.
Since announcing our move to CC-BY, we have worked with publishers, and the overwhelming majority who offer a paid open access model have moved with us and provide our researchers the option to choose the right licence.
We are very conscious that authors still get asked to choose their licence when they publish open access, and that the choice can be confusing and complex (typically they are offered the Creative Commons attribution (CC-BY), attribution with no commercial re-use (CC-BY-NC), and attribution with no commercial re-use and no right to create derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)). We understand that many researchers will have little interest in the nuances of the “NC” licence versus the “BY” licence – it would be easy to think that a charity like the Wellcome Trust would not want its funded research to be used commercially, for example – so we try to work behind the scenes to make the choice that bit easier.
So while we’re happy that the licensing landscape has been getting simpler in recent years, we are concerned that the publication of the STM model open access licences will make the author’s life unnecessarily complex. Put simply, we see no value in these new licences, and believe that if a publisher wishes to restrict how content can be used (excluding Wellcome funded, OA papers which must always be published under the CC-BY licence), the existing Creative Commons licences (e.g. CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-ND) are more than adequate.
Of course, first and foremost we also believe that anything describing itself as “open access” should truly be open, which means CC-BY – tested by users, interoperable, and globally recognised.
Chris Bird, Senior Legal Counsel, Wellcome Trust
Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services, Wellcome Library
You can find the Trust’s Open access policy on our website.
Image: “Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco” by tvol on Flickr
Unknown unknowns: Is there a selection bias against null results?
As a large funder of biomedical research, the Wellcome Trust is keen to ensure that the findings of that research are widely and openly shared. There is a body of evidence that indicates a bias against writing up and publishing certain types of result. Jonathon Kram and Adam Dinsmore, from the Wellcome Trust evaluation team, discuss why this could create a barrier to scientific progress…
There is a lot of pressure on academic researchers. Rightly or wrongly, it is widely held that researchers must publish prodigiously and secure funding consistently to advance their careers and that their research outputs must achieve high ‘impact’ to be of value.
An unintended consequence of this ‘impact culture’ may be a publication bias against research findings whose implications are not immediately obvious, or which may be deemed less novel, interesting, or eye-catching. Some research suggests that this bias may extend to research that yields negative and/or null findings.
There are a few definitions of ‘negative finding’ currently in use, but the idea of significance is central to the concept. A negative result fails to reject the null hypothesis –the proposition that no significant effect is present – within the bounds of an experiment and to a level of statistical rigour. This can occur when a treatment is found to have no greater efficacy than placebo, or when no difference is found between two distinct groups of people (e.g. conservatives and liberals) on some variable of interest.
That said, the term is also used to refer to findings of slightly different but related kinds, including:
No correlation found
Incremental improvements: Minor refinements to previously reported hypotheses (e.g. where a previous result can only be replicated in certain conditions).
A bias against sharing statistically insignificant results (alongside incremental refinements and refutations) could have detrimental effects to the progression of science and our knowledge. Researchers could waste time pursuing hypotheses which have already been disconfirmed. Clinicians could make treatment decisions based on incomplete evidence. The time and energy of human participants could be wasted in research studies which were never subsequently reported.
Worryingly, there is some evidence that this is already happening.
Hopewell et al (2007) found that research papers which reported statistically significant results were approximately four times as likely to be published as their negative counterparts. The work of Daniele Fanelli (2012) suggests that the proportion of papers publishing negative findings may be decreasing over time; in 2007 just 14% of papers indexed by ISI which declared to have tested a hypothesis reported a negative finding, down from 30% in 1990. Recently Franco et al (2014) found that negative findings are less likely to be written up for publication than more positive results.
Several attempts have been made to encourage the publication of negative findings. BioMed Central’s Journal for Negative Results in BioMedicine has published articles which either report negative findings or discuss their place in science since 2002, while Open Access publishers PLOS One and PeerJ encourage the submission of any scientific results including negative findings.
Away from conventional publication the online datahub FigShare actively encourages the upload of datasets containing null and negative findings, without requiring that the researchers responsible for them prepare a full manuscript for submission.
Credit: Wellcome Library
As a research funder, we are keen that all research findings be accessible and presented to the world; including those that describe a breakthrough, disprove a theory or demonstrate a null result. Everyone in research has an opinion of what makes “good science”, from the researchers through to the readers of a paper. Researchers, journal editors and peer-reviewers all make value judgments about what’s worth telling the rest of the world about. However, if there are processes in play that inadvertently (or advertently) discriminate against the availability of a certain type of result and its data, we risk needless repetition of research and, potentially worse, proliferation of apparent knowledge that may be wrong.
Through the open access movement and the potential of digital technologies, we have the opportunity to enable accessibility to all the findings of research and reduce research waste. If the studies cited above accurately reflect a bias against negative findings in the biomedical literature, then it is the duty of all stakeholders in the delivery of science and knowledge to engage with the issue and explore ways of correcting it.
There is no benchmark to measure the progress of science against but there are hints that there may be a lot of wasted effort caused by our attitude towards negative findings and their unloved siblings. It is only by building a stronger evidence base around negative findings, and exploring the factors that influence publication bias, that we can explore the severity of the problem and make steps towards improving the health of science.
The Wellcome Trust policy position on research involving human participants states that negative results and full disclosure are expected. We are committed to maximising the availability of and value of research data.
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