Cautious welcome for Wellcome review

The director of the Wellcome Trust has launched a full-scale review of science funding by the charity, saying that “while the way we support science has varied little over several decades, science and the way it is done have changed”.

Jeremy Farrar announced on 29 November that Wellcome was examining how it should in future allocate the £630 million that it spends on science each year. The trust’s director of science Jim Smith will lead a team looking into whether the charity is supporting the right disciplines, what career stages it should focus on and who its partners should be.

Beverley Clark, director of the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at University College London (UCL), said she hopes the review “does not bring even more uncertainty into an already very nervous funding environment in which we are faced with the unknown, but potentially debilitating, impact of Brexit”.