Mike Dexter: a welcome appointment

Few first-rate biologists start their careers with only one ‘A-level’ (High School qualification) and a job in a copper wire factory. Fewer still go on to command a research budget of £250 million a year. But then Mike Dexter, who takes over this summer as director of the UK’s Wellcome Trust, the world’s biggest medical research charity, has always done things his own way. Dexter joins the Trust this month from the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research at the Christie Hospital, Manchester, where 25 years’ work on the control of blood cell development have gained him international respect. He was the first to discover, among other things, how to grow stem cells in vitro. “It was a seminal contribution and it opened up generations of new experiments,” says Gordon McVie, director-general of the Cancer Research Campaign, which funds the institute. With more than 320 papers under his belt and a fellowship of the Royal Society, Dexter is regarded as a scientist’s scientist. But his success was not exactly handed to him on a plate. The son of a Manchester engineer and a housewife, his first job was as a trainee production manager at Frederick Smith’s copper wire factory. He realized he was bored after three months, took a job as a technician at the Paterson, got the extra ‘A-levels’ he needed at night school and went to the University of Salford to read biology in 1967, at the age of 22. By then he had already married a trainee radiographer, so he lived out in a Cheshire village, not with his fellow students in a hall of residence. He was drawn to cancer research partly by the shock of learning, on returning from a holiday, that the young son of the farm labourer who lived next door had died of leukaemia. It is because his feet have always been on the ground that Dexter is an intensely practical man say his friends — and one who can communicate with anybody. Life continued to be tougher for him than for many of his peers. He did his PhD while helping to raise twins, so research was juggled with nappies and broken nights. The relationship eventually ended; a second marriage and two more children followed. The experiences made Dexter profoundly aware of the