Annual report : 2005 / Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

  • Burroughs Wellcome Fund
Date:
2005
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Annual report : 2005 / Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “It is the gifted, unorthodox, individual, in the laboratory, or the study, or the walk by the river at twilight, who has always brought to us and must continue to bring to us, all the basic resources by which we live.” - Caryl P. Haskins Carnegie Institute President 5 2005 Annual Report Since BWF’s award programs seek to identify young scientists who will become tomorrow’s leaders and to provide them with flexible long-term support, thus enabling increased risk-taking and fostering innovation, our board felt that we should continue our current direction and emphasize investing in the human capital of the research enterprise. When BWF undertook our first terrain mapping process 10 years ago, our assets totaled $430 million. In the ensuing years, BWF has awarded approximately $250 million to fulfill our mission. Our assets have now grown to $700 million, and we make between $25 million and $30 million in grants annually. But what BWF can spend is dwarfed by the roughly $60 billion in investments made by federal funders and the pharmaceutical industry. This clear “fact of life” is what drives BWF’s decision to support individual researchers in areas that are not reached by the larger contributors of research dollars. The Fund’s strategy is to invest the bulk of our dollars—85 percent—in awards through competitive programs. We invest the remaining 15 percent through small ad hoe grants intended to improve the environment for our awardees and through catalytic grants that facilitate work on a problem of interest to our awardees, such as the sequencing of the malaria genome. K-12 Seience, Mathematics, and Technology Education To help commemorate our 50th anniversary in 2005, BWF commissioned a short history emphasizing our past two decades of grantmaking—earlier erantmaking had been well covered in a similar history written in 1985 by Iris Evans, the Fund’s first executive director. We also held an anniversary gala in May 2005, which celebrated the success of our awardees and spotlighted the need to champion science, mathematics, and technology (SMT) preK-12 education in North Carolina. The event featured leaders from the local scientific, business, and government communities who advocate for SMT education investments—and it also illustrated the importance of such investments by showcasing some of the enthusiasm and excellence of the young scientists-in-training whom BWF supports in North Carolina. At the celebration, BWF presented a $2.5 million grant to the North Carolina Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Center (SMT Center). This is a new organization that BWF has been incubating since 2002. BWF created the SMT Center in recognition of the fact that despite advances in preK-12 education in North Carolina, there is still much to be done if the state is to achieve its potential. The SMT Center will advocate, broker, facilitate, and communicate the urgency of advancing science and mathematics in the state’s schools. Its goal is to help North Carolina achieve its vision of having the best public schools in the nation by 2010. BWF recognizes that there is no magic bullet for improving preK-12 SMT education—but we also recognize that steady, patient, creative leadership from a new institution such as the SMT Center will be critical in achieving the type and degree of educational improvement needed in our home state.