Bridget Ogilvie.

Dr Bridget Ogilvie, as Director of the Wellcome Trust, has lots of money to give away. She can set the nation's biomedical research agenda. How does she make her decisions? She grew up on a sheep property in Australia and was the first female graduate in Rural Science at her university (University of New England, Armidale, NSW). Her Cambridge PhD was on 'Immunity to the intestinal nematode' and her Eureka moment was discovering the similarity of the immune response of lungworms in cattle to the immune response of people sensitive to pollen. In 1979 she joined Wellcome and now manages a budget of 300 million pounds pa, funding about 600 researchers. Dr Ogilvie explains Wellcome's policies in funding research. [More detailed synopsis available from MFAC].