People Behind Discovery Annual Review the Medical Research Council Is the UK’S Leading Publicly Funded Biomedical Research Organisation
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06/07 People behind discovery Annual Review The Medical Research Council is the UK’s leading publicly funded biomedical research organisation. Our mission is to: • Encourage and support high-quality research with the aim of improving human health. • Produce skilled researchers, and to advance and disseminate knowledge and technology to improve the quality of life and economic competitiveness in the UK. • Promote dialogue with the public about medical research. 01 Vision & hearing page 4 02 Neurobiology & neurodegeneration page 6 03 Mental illness & behavioural disorders page 10 04 Genetic diseases page 14 05 Cancer page 18 06 Heart disease & stroke page 22 07 Obesity & diabetes page 26 08 Infections & the immune system page 30 09 Public health page 34 10 Turning research into healthcare page 38 Supporting careers in medical research For almost a century, the Medical Research Council (MRC) has employed and funded people who’ve made pioneering discoveries and improved the health of millions. Together these scientists, clinicians, support staff, technicians, nurses, business managers, administrators, engineers and countless other people have created an unsurpassed catalogue of achievement. Today, we employ more than 4,000 staff in our own research institutions and support about another 3,300 researchers and students on grants. The MRC is an employer as well as a research funder. Some of our researchers start their careers on studentships or fellowships with the MRC. Others are supported on grants or in our units for a time before moving on. Many spend their whole career with the MRC. Our scientists work in many different research environments. These include hospitals, universities, medical schools, the biotechnology, diagnostics and pharmaceutical industries and MRC units, institutes and centres. The MRC also supports people who later in their careers might help move science into policy and practice. In this year’s Annual Review we feature some of the discoveries made by MRC scientists during the past year. We also introduce you to some of the people behind these discoveries. Each of these people has a story to tell about the work they do and the career path they’ve taken. For instance, Viv Moffat at the University of Edinburgh, who previously worked as a mental health nurse, has just finished her PhD. She is contributing to a decade-long study of brain imaging and schizophrenia. Dr Rachel Batterham is an obesity and diabetes specialist, who spends much of her time undertaking research to try to find new ways to help the patients she treats. Professor Steve Brown runs the MRC’s Mammalian Genetics Unit at Harwell. He is researching the genetic causes of deafness. And Professor Jeanne Bell started her career in anatomy but then moved to pathology and neuropathology. For more than two decades she has been researching the effects on the brain of HIV and its treatment. The wide range of training opportunities available to scientists means careers can be forged in various ways. For instance, the MRC Career Development Fellowship scheme provides early career post-doctoral scientists with training positions within MRC research units to help establish themselves as research scientists. Our Clinician Scientist Fellowship scheme gives up to five years of funding for post-doctoral scientists in universities. We offer training awards in particular areas where there are national shortages, such as biostatistics, stem cell biology and public health. We also run studentships, aimed at supporting post-graduate students, in collaboration with other research funders, universities and industry. This is just a snapshot of the MRC’s dedicated training schemes. For more information about these programmes and others, visit www.mrc.ac.uk/careers. continued… … it’s important to develop scientists beyond their research … it’s less about a job for life and more about providing opportunities, skills and knowledge for life. MRC Annual Review 2006/07 1 continued … The MRC doesn’t just support scientific careers – we also have hundreds of people sustaining our research, working in administration, business, intellectual property and the many other roles needed to facilitate the best medical research. For example, over the past year we have increased training opportunities and expanded the national qualifications available for our animal technicians. We have also completed a trial training a group of staff to diploma level in management skills. But we don’t work in isolation. We achieve much more when we work closely with other organisations to tailor the finest range of training and development opportunities available. The Department of Health (www.dh.gov.uk), the UK Clinical Research Collaboration (www.ukcrc.org), the Research Councils UK’s Research Careers Diversity Unit (www.rcuk.ac.uk/rescareer/rcdu), the other research councils (www.rcuk.ac.uk), universities and charities such as the Wellcome Trust (www.wellcome.ac.uk) are just some of the organisations we work with to make this happen. As the UK landscape for medical research changes, the MRC is well placed to continue to foster the best scientists and the best science. The introduction of an Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research (OSCHR) to oversee medical research in the UK means that, in the future, the MRC will work even more closely with the Department of Health’s National Institute for Health Research (www.nihr.ac.uk) and with other medical research organisations and industry. These changes will present more opportunities for training the next generation of medical researchers. The MRC realises that it’s important to develop scientists beyond their research. These days, it’s less about a job for life and more about providing opportunities, skills and knowledge for life. What we do wouldn’t be possible without the people who make up the MRC. We hope that you’ll enjoy reading the stories of just a few of these people and finding out about some of our scientific achievements from the past year. Welcome Professor Colin Blakemore, MRC Chief Executive In any career, nothing is more important than the people who teach you and the environment in which you learn. In my own career, I was very lucky in both respects. I was the first person in my family to go to school beyond the age of 15. My parents knew nothing about higher education but were extraordinarily encouraging. I passed my 11-plus, went to an excellent grammar school in Coventry and won a State Scholarship to study medicine at Cambridge, which covered all my costs. The academic ethos of Cambridge was intoxicating for me, from a working-class background, unsure what I wanted to do with my life. It was the early sixties, just 10 years after the discovery of the structure of DNA. The realisation that, just a stone’s throw from where I was studying, Crick and Watson had revolutionised our understanding of life had a huge impact on me. I won a Harkness Fellowship to study in the States after I graduated from Cambridge, and went to the University of California, Berkeley, to work with Horace Barlow, great-great-grandson of Darwin and one of the most influential neurophysiologists of the last century. Again, I found myself in an extraordinary environment. It wasn’t so much the quality of the facilities – techniques were pretty simple then. It was the passion and support of the others in the lab – not just the leaders, but the postdocs and the other graduate students, all learning from each other through the curious mixture of tedium and exhilaration that makes research such a remarkable career. Luck is important, I must admit. And I was very lucky. My research was a goldmine: I finished my PhD in record time and was offered a tenure-track position at Cambridge at the age of 23. And I picked up my first grant from the MRC just a year later. That enabled me to set up my own lab, but I also benefited from collaboration with Fergus Campbell, Roger Carpenter and many others in Cambridge. I found myself in the middle of a little scientific revolution – the birth of neuroscience as a discipline in its own right. With a lot of support from the MRC over the years, I never looked back. I sometimes regret not completing a clinical degree and not having the experience of a postdoctoral appointment. There were disappointments and challenges along the way (not least the 13 years for which I was targeted by animal rights extremists). But the joy of discovery, and the camaraderie of my research group, with young people from around the world, compensated for any problems. Things are different today. Training has to be longer. Jobs are harder to find. Competition is more extreme. But medical research is still a wonderful career – a chance to comprehend things that no- one has ever understood before and to be part of a worldwide effort to improve the lives of others. MRC Annual Review 2006/07 3 Name Robin Ali Name Robert MacLaren Education Undergraduate and PhD Born 14 November 1966 in Epsom, Surrey at University College London Education MB ChB, University of Edinburgh; Awards 2001 Sir Jules Thorn Award DPhil, University of Oxford for Biomedical Research Family Married with three children: William Current job title Professor of Human (3), Imogen (2) and Edward (6 months) Molecular Genetics Awards 2007 King James IV Professorship Time in current position 5 years of Surgery, 2005 Oxford Ophthalmological Field of research Development of Congress Founder’s Cup and Medal, 2005 gene and cell therapies for the Royal Society of Medicine Prize Meeting treatment of eye disease in Ophthalmology Ambition To make a real difference Current job title Clinician Scientist and to patients with visual impairment Honorary Consultant Career highlight Helping perform the world’s first retinal gene therapy treatment Blind mice see again Professor Robin Ali and Dr Robert MacLaren (see profiles) at the Institute of Ophthalmology/Moorfields Eye Hospital 01 Vision & hearing in London have overcome a major hurdle to restore vision in blind mice.