Jeremy Farrar

Could he help bring biomedicine to the climate debate?

Farrar is not an obvious choice for this, and largely a response to a judge who nominated “scientists in other fields than climate, medics.” An expert in tropical medicine, before taking up Directorship of the Wellcome Trust last autumn, Farrar led the Trust’s overseas programme in Vietnam. Google “Jeremy Farrar + climate” and you’ll mainly get headlines about anti-biotic resistance being as important as global warming. Indeed, his recent call for an IPCC for antimicrobial resistance left some climate analysts wondering if anyone at Wellcome had ever really spent much time looking at what the IPCC does and achieves. Activists’ attention to Wellcome has largely been focused on their endowment (and how much it invests in fossil fuels) but they could ask more questions about the Trust as a player in science policy and funder of scientific research. A few years ago it looked as if Wellcome would be taking a concerted global lead on the medical impacts of climate change, we may yet see them return to this. He is @JeremyFarrar on Twitter.