Negotiating research priorities

Professor Sally Davies, glancing occasionally at the press office's minder across the table, is choosing her words carefully. Once or twice, and quite voluntarily, she retracts her first comment and substitutes something a shade more cautious—a sensible precaution when taking up a new and sometimes high profile job. But on one topic, the science of her specialty, she enthuses without restraint. Entirely apt in someone who's just become John Pattison's successor as director of NHS research and development.

Davies's specialty is blood. “The wonderful thing about haematology is that there's no other branch of medicine that gives you so much opportunity to look down a microscope and then talk to the patient. The fascination is in bringing molecular medicine into the clinic.” Although this translation from laboratory to clinic is now happening in more and more specialties, haematology was still a pioneer in the process when Davies joined it in 1981.

Her original decision to choose haematology was fortuitous and taken partly for domestic reasons: “It …