Sir John Bell

clinical data on any of these people.

So I said, yeah, yeah, okay, I get it.

Just give us the money and let us get on.

So anyway, it's quite an interesting story because it does show how conservative the community actually is for new ideas.

We then...

I chaired the first science committee and we decided about a year into it that we really needed a chief executive.

So we got Rory Collins to lead it and he's done it.

I sat on the board then for the next 10 years, but it will look, it was a great success.

And as you say, it is kind of the paradigm for now large companies.

global cohorts, genetic epidemiology cohorts.

So then, as you know, I advised government for many years and David Cameron had just been elected as prime minister.

This was in about 2010.

And at the time,

I'd been tracking, because we had quite a strong genomics program in the Wellcome Trust Center, which I'd set up in the university, and we were really interested in the genetics of common disease.

And it became clear that the price of sequencing, and Illumina was now the clear leader in the sequencing space, but it was also clear that Illumina was making significant advances in the price of sequencing, because as you remember the days when it cost $5,000 to do a genome.

Anyway, it became clear that they actually had technology that gets you down to a much more sensible price, something like $500 a genome.

So I approached David and I said, you know, we're now pretty sure that for many of the rare diseases that you see in clinical practice,

There is a genetic answer that can be detected if you sequenced a whole genome.

So why don't we set something up in the NHS to provide what was essentially the beginnings of a clinical service to help the parents of kids with various disabilities work out what's going on, what's wrong with their children.

And David had had a child with Odahara syndrome, which as you know is again... And so David was very... He said, oh God, I'll tell you the story about how awful it was for...