Wellcome Research Laboratories

Wellcome Research Laboratories was a site in south-east London, namely Beckenham, that was a main research centre for pharmaceuticals. Until 1965, this laboratory site was situated in Kent.

History

File:WPRL 'Old Boys' at Langley Court Wellcome L0041459.jpg

Staff at Langley Court in the 1930s

In 1894 Henry Wellcome set up a laboratory in central London to investigate a treatment for diphtheria. In 1898 it moved to Brockwell Hall in Herne Hill (now in Lambeth). In 1919 Henry Wellcome bought a 105-acre site in Beckenham, Kent, which cost £32,000. The site had belonged to the Langley family since 1350. Langley Court had been built in 1886 by James Bucknall, who lived in the house with his family until 1914.

It was named the Wellcome Research Laboratories in 1946 after the Wellcome Chemical Research Laboratories moved to the site. The Wellcome Trust had been set up in 1936, after the death in that year of Sir Henry Wellcome.

Closure

It closed in 1995 after Wellcome had been taken over by Glaxo in March 1995 to form Glaxo Wellcome. In December 2000, Glaxo Wellcome became GlaxoSmithKline, when it merged with SmithKline Beecham.

Directors

• Sir Salvador Moncada FRS 1986-95 (1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine)

Alumni

• Adrien Albert
• Sir James Black (pharmacologist) FRS, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Medicine
• Victor Darley-Usmar
• George H. Hitchings, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Medicine
• Trevor M Jones
• Charles Kellaway FRS
• Gilberto de Nucci
• Alan R. Saltiel
• Sir John Vane FRS, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Medicine
• John L. Wallace
• Gertrude B. Elion, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1988.

See also

• Wellcome Research Institute, in central London
• Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, in Oxford
• Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research, in Cambridge
• Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, in Cambridgeshire

External links

• Wellcome Research history