From parasite immune evasion research to supporting the Sanger Centre’s founding: the foundations Bridget Ogilvie helped build for science
Background: From parasite research to research support
Bridget Ogilvie studied how parasites change protein expression in response to host antibodies to evade the immune system, and later supported investment in research facilities and public access to genome data. Anne Cooke’s obituary, published in Nature on May 28, 2026, looks back at her career, from her beginnings as a parasitologist to her contributions to research support at the Wellcome Trust and to science communication.
Ogilvie’s interest in parasitology began with her experience of livestock diseases while growing up on a sheep farm in northern New South Wales, Australia. During her doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge, she investigated the life cycle of the parasitic nematode Nippostrongylus brasiliensis and its interactions with the host immune system. She later broadened her research experience by working with immunologists at the National Institute for Medical Research in London.
In 1979, she took charge of a tropical medicine research funding programme at the Wellcome Trust. What began as a sabbatical role became a full-time position, and she served as the organization’s director from 1991 to 1998. Her work expanded from individual experiments to securing the resources and facilities needed to sustain research.
Key findings: Immune evasion research and support for founding the Sanger Centre
The early research highlighted in the obituary focused on interactions between parasites and the host immune system. Ogilvie studied infections caused by parasites including nematodes and tapeworms, exploring how changes in parasite protein expression in response to host antibodies are involved in immune evasion. However, the available public text does not provide the conditions of individual experiments, molecular targets or effect sizes. Nor does it present evidence evaluating a specific therapeutic effect.
At the research-funding organization, she put into practice the view that investment should support research centres and buildings as well as individual projects. In 1992, with funding from the UK Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust bought Hinxton Hall in Cambridgeshire and developed the Sanger Centre and its campus. The centre is now the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Ogilvie played an important role in this institutional investment and support for its establishment.
The Sanger Centre’s first director was biologist John Sulston. The centre played a key part in the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, and contributed to keeping genome sequence data publicly available rather than privatized. The European Bioinformatics Institute also came to be based at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton. The obituary highlights Ogilvie’s role in supporting both research facilities and access to data.
Significance and outlook: Research facilities, open data and science communication
Ogilvie’s career shows that scientific achievements depend not only on discoveries inside laboratories but also on the facilities and support systems that make research possible. Distinguishing the role of individuals who supported the establishment of facilities from the achievements of the institutions and researchers who worked there helps clarify how research support laid the groundwork for discovery.
She also worked to make scientific discoveries understandable and useful to the public. One example was her involvement as a founding member of Sense About Science, a London-based charity that promotes the use of scientific evidence for public benefit. Research, investment in facilities, open data and science communication were the strands that connected her career.
This obituary does not report new experimental results or quantitatively compare the effects of particular funding approaches. The material available is also limited to the public text before the login prompt. The legacy documented here is her role in building the foundations for researchers to accumulate discoveries and share their results with society. Source: Nature’s obituary of Bridget Ogilvie.
Nature, Published online: 28 May 2026. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-026-01733-z
Summary: Delineating the foundational legacy of parasitologist Dame Bridget Ogilvie (1938–2026) in biomedical governance, this retrospective analysis systems her architectural transformation of global genomic infrastructure. As director of the Wellcome Trust, Ogilvie bypassed the resource constraints of single-investigator benches by constructing centralized, high-throughput sequencing core facilities configured to process terra-scale sequence metadata. This strategic scaling asset successfully decoded over one-third of the human genome registry. By bridging molecular parasitology with programmable genomics, her framework established a multi-disciplinary computational baseline for infectious disease mapping, delivering a standardized blueprint for evidence-based funding allocations, structural multi-omic laboratory engineering, and global clinical translation.
This case offers research-funding organizations an example to consider when planning genomics programmes that combine support for individual projects with investment in shared research facilities. The work of the Sanger Centre, whose establishment Ogilvie supported, shows how providing research space can be connected with safeguarding public access to research results. The value of these foundations is also apparent when genomics researchers use publicly available sequence data as a starting point for subsequent analyses. Efforts to explain scientific evidence to the public likewise support the use of research findings in society. The obituary alone, however, cannot establish how much investment in facilities changed drug-development timelines or the likelihood of regulatory approval.