Annual report : 1998 / Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

  • Burroughs Wellcome Fund
Date:
1998
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Annual report : 1998 / Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The mission of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund is to advance the medical sciences by supporting research and other scientific and educational activities. Within this broad mandate, we place primary emphasis on basic biomedical science—research aimed at discovering fundamental knowledge that will underpin broader efforts to improve human health and well-being. To carry out our mission, BWF’s general strategy is to support the development of promising U.S. and Canadian scientists early in their careers and to support investigators working in or entering areas of science that are undervalued or underfunded. With this thumbnail sketch in mind, I would beg the reader’s permission to paint a broader-brush picture of what BWF hopes to accomplish. I’m inspired by a book published in 1998 by Dr. Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard University, who is one of the great science philosophers as well as a brilliant science practitioner. In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Dr. Wilson attempts to assemble the many issues of concern to the human species into a unified intellectual framework. To this framework he gives the name “consilience,” a term invented by the 19th-century philosopher William Whewell and derived from a Latin word meaning “jumping together.” Consilience, Dr. Wilson says, is a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. He goes on to posit that science, which holds the values of consilience at its very core, may provide a unified basis for ethics, religion, art, and the regulation of human society. While such ambitions are far beyond the scope of BWF’s activities, we are attempting our own efforts at consilience. First, of course, BWF through our various competitive award programs strives to support individuals who will bring new approaches and novel ideas to their scientific fields. By thinking outside the proverbial box, these researchers, it is hoped, will be singularly adept at making knowledge “jump” in exciting ways. Similarly, BWE provides awards targeted at enabling clinician scientists to shuttle creatively between the laboratory bench and the patient’s bedside, as well as awards intended to encourage academic institutions to broaden the training of advanced students in physics, chemistry, and mathematics so they can bring their quantitative and theoretical skills to the biological arena. (BWF’s Interfaces between the Physical/Chemical/Computational Sciences and the Biological Sciences program is featured in the article beginning on page 20.) The spirit of consilience also is reflected in BWPF’s desire to foster links between academe and industry across all of our award programs. This focus not only is a fitting legacy for an organization that began life as a corporate foundation; it also is necessary in order to reap the benefits of new scientific knowledge. In addition, BWF complements our competitive award programs by bringing together—consilience, yet again—people and institutions around common problems in the medical sciences. In this president’s message, I hope to illustrate how consilience has proved manifest in some of the key events during BWF’s 1998 fiscal year. In the next section, Martha Peck, BWF’s vice president for programs, will provide the detailed brush strokes that will bring our various programs and activities to life.
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