When you are shelling out $2.4 million per day, it pays to plan ahead. That is the conclusion of Britain's mammoth biomedical charity, the Wellcome Trust, which this week released its first-ever 5-year plan. The roadmap will guide the $22 billion charity's increasing spending, which has tripled over the last 3 years to about $900 million per year, says trust director Mike Dexter.
According to the 14-page document, the trust will spend nearly $4.5 billion by September 2005 on a wide variety of projects around the globe, including research grants, lab construction, education, and its share of constructing the new Diamond synchrotron near Oxford. The trust will also create a $390 million fund to support un-expected "emerging research opportunities." Wellcome, however, will not feel bound by the document if priorities change, Dexter says: "The plan is not written in stone. Every year we will be evaluating things."
