'If we act in a co-ordinated way this Ebola epidemic can be brought under control': how Professor Jeremy Farrar plans on making world a better place

As head of the Wellcome Trust Professor Jeremy Farrar is at the centre of London’s science community. He talks Nobel Prize-winners, contagion wars and superlabs with Nick Curtis
Hands-on: professor Jeremy Farrar working in Ho Chi Minh City where he identified bird flu in humans (Picture: Chau Doan/LightRocket via Getty)
Chau Doan/LightRocket via Getty Images
Nick Curtis @nickcurtis9 October 2014

I don’t think London is at risk of a major epidemic of Ebola tomorrow,” says Professor Jeremy Farrar. “No, that is not going to happen.” When Farrar says this, you listen: the 53-year-old is director of the Wellcome Trust, the £16.4 billion foundation that invests huge sums in biomedical and other research. He is a specialist in infectious diseases who battled both SARS and bird flu.

In the past two months the trust has announced a multi-million-pound emergency funding package for Ebola research, a long-term investment in science in Africa and a £3.2 million grant to fast-track Ebola treatment trials. When we speak, it is early morning in Philadelphia, where Farrar is addressing a conference of the Infectious Disease Society of America.

“Inevitably, in today’s connected world, what happens in Sierra Leone, Liberia or Guinea — countries that people might not have known much about before this crisis — are going to affect people in London in all sorts of ways,” says Farrar. “The situation in West Africa is absolutely dire. But I don’t think it is inevitable that it will get worse and worse. We in the West are as well prepared as we can be. If we act now in a co-ordinated fashion this epidemic can be brought under control. Then we need to make sure we learn the lessons from it, so when the crisis passes we do not leave these three countries, and others with similar fragile health systems, at risk of it happening again.”

Farrar speaks from experience. During 18 years working for the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, before taking up his post at the Wellcome Trust, he saw the secretive China blindsided by SARS, and he and his Vietnamese colleague Tran Tinh Hien identified the 2004 emergence of bird flu in humans.

He thinks governments and health agencies have got better at identifying outbreaks and sharing information, but need to act faster on it and focus their responses. During his week in America he will be in discussion with “the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the US government and others to ensure what we are all doing is joined-up”.

Farrar is a great believer in integration, not just between medical researchers, public health agencies, governments and aid agencies, but between science and wider society. We speak, therefore, at a propitious time, as the Nobel Prize for physiology was awarded jointly this week to neuroscientist John O’Keefe for his research at how brain cells “map” the body’s external environment. “His science is brilliant, of course,” says Farrar of O’Keefe, “and if you wanted to meet somebody brilliant but with a real humanity, generosity of spirit and warmth as an individual about him, that would be him.”

Farrar himself is prominent in the Evening Standard’s list of the 1,000 most influential Londoners, which will be published next week with the support of both the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The trust doesn’t need the publicity and nor, frankly, do the Gateses but Farrar sees the 1000 list as an important way of “celebrating the connectivity of people from all walks of life”.

Does London now lead the world in life-saving science, as it does in finance, fashion and the arts? Or has it ever been thus and we are only now noticing? “It is getting more coverage,” says Farrar, before taking the metrocentric wind out of my sails. “Actually, I would put it more broadly. It is perhaps [now] known to a wider community that biomedical science is in an incredibly strong position right across the UK. Of course, in many ways London provides a catalyst, with things like the Crick Institute — which will be transformative for biomedical science in the capital when it opens [in 2015] — but there’s also Imperial College, University College, Queen Mary, King’s. It’s an absolutely wonderful place, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to come back to the UK, after 18 years away. But we had Nobel Prize-winners from the University of Manchester last year. Edinburgh is a powerhouse, Dundee is a powerhouse, Cardiff is a fantastic centre for neurosciences.”

Farrar is an emblem of connectivity, of crossing boundaries. He sounds impeccably English but was born in Singapore and brought up in New Zealand, Cyprus and Libya, his father an English teacher and his mother a writer and artist. He settled on medicine only after his A-levels, and trained in neuroscience at UCL, Oxford and Edinburgh. After becoming a professor at Oxford he decamped to Vietnam.

His wife, Christiane Dolecek is an Austrian typhoid researcher: they married in 1998 and have three children, Sam, 16, Georgie, 14, and Charlie, who has just turned 13.

He talks about the five political or biomedical changes he thinks would make the world a better place and also about his own family charity. He and Dolecek set up the Farrar Foundation in 2011, inspired by both their sets of parents, to increase opportunity among the underprivileged of South-East Asia.

I ask Farrar how his parents inspired him. He says they gave him “a sense that whatever you achieve is because of the environment you are in. Some of us have been lucky and had the opportunities to achieve more than we should do, given our talents. But everybody deserves that opportunity. It’s important we appreciate that it is not just ourselves as individuals, with our own talents, that drives success.”

FARRAR’S FIVE-POINT PLAN FOR A BETTER WORLD

Share information

“In the interconnected world we live in there is an absolute requirement to share information: we can’t just suck ideas out of somewhere.”

Make the case for genetic sequencing

“This is the era of the genomic revolution, and we have to bring society and the public along with it. It raises major questions of privacy but a better understanding of genomics will lead us to a healthier world.”

Fund neuroscientific research

“Given the rise in problems related to dementia, Alzheimer’s and mental health generally, a greater understanding of how our brains operate — as highlighted in the Nobel Prize this week — could help shed real light on incredibly complex things.”

Be vigilant

“Go back to my grandparents’ generation and infectious diseases were a scourge of whole societies. We’ve made enormous inroads but we must never think that we have solved the problem.”

Integrate science with society

“Science should not exist in its own space but be part of the debate that we have as a culture.”

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