In 2003 an international consortium published the complete sequence of all 3bn “letters” that make up the human genetic code. The UK’s leading role in this effort owed much to the guiding hand of the plain-speaking Australian-born scientist Bridget Ogilvie. As director of the Wellcome Trust, Britain’s largest medical research charity, she oversaw the creation in 1993 of the Sanger Centre at Hinxton near Cambridge, an innovation in scientific infrastructure dedicated to churning out high-quality sequence as fast as possible. Today the Wellcome Sanger Institute uses its high-throughput technology to study health and disease, and document the diversity of life.
Ogilvie, who has died aged 88, joined Wellcome in 1979 to oversee the charity’s tropical medicine research programmes half-time while continuing her own research into parasitic worms. She joined the full-time staff in 1981. At the time it was relatively small, disbursing around £12m in grants a year derived from the profits of its wholly owned drug company, the Wellcome Foundation.
