Category: Science

A press release just in from the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry announces that HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) intends to throw £5million ($9m) into two major initiatives from the RSC and the Institute of Physics. The announcement follows an agreement last year that HEFCE would work with a group of organisations to support strategically important and vulnerable subjects.

At a time when UK chemistry and physics departments seem to be getting earmarked for closure on an almost yearly basis, this additional funding might be quite timely. Steve Egan, Acting Chief Executive of HEFCE, explains the rationale behind it, ‘We believe that the long-term health of these subjects can best be secured by ensuring that there is an increasing demand from people wishing to study them who are well informed about future career prospects. We are pleased to work with partners – including the learned societies, universities, schools, colleges and employers – to stimulate interest and excitement in these subjects and to bring them to the attention of pupils from a wide range of backgrounds.’

Exeter University, Queen Mary’s, Kings College London, Swansea, to name but a few have all closed their chemistry lab doors for the last time and at the time of writing the future of Sussex University’s chemistry department (5-rated and the source of two Nobel laureates remains in the balance. Sussex’s senate intends to hold a debate with “stakeholders” (students, staff and advisers in other words) in the near future before making the final decision to shut it down.

The plan will cripple all the chemical sciences at the university, including biochemistry, chemical biology, and medicine, Harry Kroto said in a video appeal to Sussex (http://tinyurl.com/j2qmj) where he carried out his Nobel-winning fullerene research.

Where were these initiatives when those institutions were seeing dwindling chemistry enrolment numbers? Why didn’t someone think to check how the physics and chemistry departments were doing before allowing them to close? Of course, some of these departments have been re-born as merged and rebranded subsidiaries of biology. But, where will the fundamental physics and chemistry be taught if students are more concerned with biotech applications than understanding the underlying principles?

The RSC press release tells us that “The Chemistry For Our Future programme aims to ensure a strong and sustainable chemical science community within higher education, and to provide a sound basis for continuing the success of industries that rely on chemistry.” IOP’s, on the other hand, “Stimulating Demand for Physics programme will be funded in partnership with several universities and a wide range of other organisations.” The aim is to enhance understanding between schools and universities, smoothing the transition to higher education while informing curriculum development.

Is a few million quid going to save other chemistry departments from the bio fate? One can hope so, but the recent Oxford Uni refurb that is taking that particular department forward with considerable pace cost £60m. £5m might seem too little, too late for some departments heading the way of King’s and the rest.

I interviewed Steve Bryant for the chemistry magazine Reactive Reports, mainly about PubChem, how and why it was set up, what are its limitations, and the various controversies surrounding this chemistry database.

Bryant had become increasingly involved with information resources because, he told me, that is the most valuable thing we can do with computers and molecular databases. Making the information as accessible to researchers as possible was to be critical. “There was a whole world of information about the bio activities/properties of small molecules that was not included in our retrieval systems in as good a way as it could have been,” he says, “I thought it be worthwhile to do as it would have a major impact on research.”

Read the complete interview in the March 2006 edition of Reactive Reports.

When it comes to particles, we usually think of opposites attracting – north and south, positive and negative. But, somehow particles that one might expect to mutually repel somehow manage to form clusters in solution. How this can be was the subject of a research project undertaken by Gerhard Kahl of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Vienna University of Technology, and colleagues. Their finding could be important for understanding how polymers become organized and improve the prospects of the burgeoning field of soft matter research.

Get the complete picture in the March issue of chemistry webzine ReactiveReports.com