Nicholas Mellor

Abstract

At first glance, Nicholas Mellor is every inch the English businessman, part of that class of private-school-educated men who monopolise the top echelons of British economic life. But Mellor has a few surprises up his sleeve for those who judge his book solely by its cover. As a man who interrupted an orthodox business career to help establish a humanitarian aid organisation, his contribution to world medicine is greater than you might expect. Over coffee and moussaka in a quiet London café, Mellor explained to me that his interest in humanitarian issues stemmed from his days at Oxford University, when a study trip to India gave him more than he bargained for. His cheap flight was routed via Moscow and Kabul, and bad timing landed him in the Afghan capital in the middle of the invasion by the USSR. Later, in India, he travelled to Dharamsala, home to many Tibetan refugees. “In the course of 2 weeks, I happened to witness one superpower invasion of another country, and the consequences 30 years on of another.” 14 years and a few adventures later, he co-founded the UK-based charity Merlin with Chris Besse and Mark Dalton, to provide health care in crisis situations. Since then, Merlin has tackled catastrophes in 30 countries—their work ranging from establishing a centre in a children's refugee camp in Zaire after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, to providing primary health care in northern Afghanistan. Merlin has also stood out by specialising in Lassa fever and supports the only dedicated Lassa fever ward in the world, in Sierra Leone. In April this year, the man who established that ward, Aniru Conteh, died after contracting the disease. For Mellor this sad loss has broader implications: it showed “how unresilient our public-health interventions” can be, because Aniru “was almost single-handedly holding the front line in that area”. Mellor has stepped back from Merlin somewhat and now runs his own management consultancy, but his dedication to strengthening humanitarian interventions still burns strong. As an individual who himself is outside the normal definition of a non-governmental organisation worker, he sees his role as trying to reach out beyond that exclusive community to engage people outside. “You find a place where you can make a personal difference at the margin, at the edge.” For him, that has increasingly been about the technological edge. “Today's edge is often tomorrow's centre”, he notes. “Unless we can learn to deal with these things as they arise, we will have missed an opportunity inconceivable to any generation before us—communications that reach virtually every corner of the world, more resources than ever before, and extraordinary advances in biomedical research.”