Obituary: Peter Williams, 89, Longtime Wellcome Trust Leader

Former Wellcome Trust director Peter Williams, who built the British medical charity into a force in global health and one of the world’s wealthiest foundations, has died at the age of 89, the Financial Times reports.

Dr. Williams led the trust from 1965 to 1991, during which time its grant-making increased a hundredfold to about $168-million a year and its endowment grew to $8.4-billion. The expansion was fueled by changes the former military physician engineered in the relationship between the charity and its namesake pharmaceutical company, which went public in 1985 and was later bought by the firm now known as GlaxoSmithKline.

Wellcome now has investments worth more than $28-billion and spends $1-billion a year, focusing on bioscience, work made possible by Dr. Williams’s “ambitious vision and commitment to independence and long-term strategic governance,” said William Castell, the trust’s chairman.