History
Until the 1970s the Institute maintained laboratories and conducted research on infectious disease and vaccines. It was funded by manufacturing and selling vaccines.
In the 1970s the Institute ran into financial difficulties. It had continual annual deficits, plus the need for major expenditure to modernise the Elstree, Hertfordshire, production facilities. Professor Albert Neuberger became involved as chair of governing body in 1973-74, at which point he became aware of the difficult financial problems. The endowment funds were insufficient to cover their requirements and it failed to get Government support. Neuberger came to the conclusion that within five to six years it would be bankrupt and he persuaded colleagues to dissolve the Institute. He persuaded Westminster Council to change the use of buildings. The Chelsea laboratories were closed in 1975 and Elstree in 1978. The assets were sold, the most valuable being the Chelsea site.
This raised enough money to annually endow a number of Senior Research Fellowships, which is the Institute's legacy. From that point it became a science funding body, and it now awards the Lister Institute Research Prize Fellowships to researchers working on infectious disease in the United Kingdom. The Institute's assets in 2010 amounted to about £33m.
Read more about this topic: Lister Institute Of Preventive Medicine
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)