Read more: “Impossible reactions: Five chemistry rules broken“

CHEMISTRY lies at the heart of much current and future technology. It is essential to the understanding of molecular biology, materials science, the environment, healthcare developments, energy… Indeed, to all of the foundation stones upon which a modern industrial nation stands.

Yet while chemistry is ubiquitous, it is also all but invisible to the general population. Chemistry’s media profile is low, and when chemical research does catch the public’s attention, it is more often under the banner of materials science or nanotechnology.

Why should this be? Part of the answer, I think, is that we chemists are not seen to be addressing the “big” questions of science. Physics deals with both the origins and the fate of the universe, and with its most basic building blocks: nuclear forces, subatomic particles and the like. Biology deals with big questions of a different sort: the origins of life, the workings of the cells of our bodies, the genetics that determine who we are.

Chemists have by and large ceded the limelight to their colleagues in other disciplines, even though chemistry frequently plays a key part in answering these big questions. In fact, chemistry is so ubiquitous, and so central to scientific progress, that it has paradoxically become less visible.

It is like looking at the night sky: the bright stars of physics and biology catch the attention, but it is the vast array of the individually faint stars of chemistry that collectively casts most light.

And new chemical stars are being discovered all the time (see “Impossible chemistry: Crystal paradox“). Some of these discoveries are wonderful, some startling, some profound. Many can still be made by individuals or small groups of researchers, working with relatively inexpensive equipment – a far cry from the huge consortia and giant projects needed to address the big questions of physics. Chemistry is also very much an empirical science and its rules of thumb, tried and tested though they often are, leave scope for surprises and ingenious inventions.

Such research has far-reaching consequences. For example, new and intellectually stimulating work on “green” chemistry is reducing the use of organic solvents, leading to huge improvements in efficiency and environmental benefits. There is a global revolution under way, but it may as well be happening in secret for all the attention it receives.

So it is especially welcome to see New �Ӱ�ԭ�� putting chemistry on its cover. It would be even more welcome to see this followed up by more of the same, both in print and other media. It has often been said that chemistry needs a champion in the mould of Brian Cox or Richard Dawkins. That is starting to happen with the arrival of such popularisers as of University College London.

Thankfully, the truth about chemistry now seems to be making itself known. Perhaps the sustained efforts to highlight the importance of chemistry by the Royal Society of Chemistry and our academic and industrial colleagues are bearing fruit.

In the UK, we have seen a sharp rise in schoolchildren opting to study the subject, and such strong demand for university places that most chemistry departments are full. British universities such as Lancaster and Brighton have reopened departments to meet demand from students and employers. Just as well, too, as the chemical sciences underpin some 21 per cent of the UK’s GDP – a contribution which any government ignores at its peril.

Those of Germany and the US have taken this message to heart. Strikingly, so have the governments of China, India, and Brazil, which are investing heavily in chemical research. These countries know their future economic development, and the health and wealth of their people, depends on chemistry.

There is no end to the benefits chemistry will bring to us all in the coming years: plastic electronics, self-cleaning clothes, sustainable food, clean water and renewable energy, to name a few. So there is ample reason for us chemists to be effervescent about the future. We should strive to ensure the public shares in our excitement.

“There is no end to the benefits that chemistry will bring all of us in the near future”

In November each year the government announces public expenditure figures
for the three following financial years. The figures for the coming year,
which starts in the next April, are firm: the figures for the following
two years are planning figures, subject to adjustments in subsequent public
expenditure rounds. At this stage in the annual cycle, the ABRC is told
what adjustments the government has made to the overall science budget,
and has to advise the Secretary of State for Education and Science how the
available resources should be allocated between the five research councils,
the Royal Society and the Fellowship of Engineering. The allocations are
usually announced in December and, at that stage, these bodies know their
overall budgets for the year beginning in April and planning figures for
the following two years.

This is how the outcome of the public expenditure process is handled.
An issue of central importance to understanding the roles of the ABRC and
the research councils is how that process is initiated: what rules govern
the use of existing resources and the nature of proposals for additional
expenditure?

The research councils’ primary budgetary responsibilities are well set
out in the government’s recent reply to the House of Lords select committee
report on the science budget for 1991-92 (HMSO, Cm 1609): ‘At the heart
of the planning process is the requirement that each research council should
assume in preparing its forward plans that it will receive no more than
the announced planning figures for the year in question. Research programmes,
including new initiatives, should be prepared on that basis, and expenditure
on those programmes should be planned to be contained strictly within the
planning figures.’

The clear implication is that research councils are expected to rank
their activities, and potential activities, in order of priority and to
support those of highest priority within their known resources (as defined
by the last allocation by the secretary of state). It follows that, in bidding
to government through the ABRC for additional resources in the annual public
expenditure round, councils must bid for the support of activities that
they judge tobe important but necessarily of lower priority than those included
within the existing baseline on the expectation that no extra resources
will be provided.

There is, however, one important exception to this rule. The priority
of existing activities may become too low for continued funding within the
known baseline, and too low, also, for them to be the subject of a bid for
additional resources. But additional expenditure may still be necessary
to effect an orderly withdrawal from the activity in question, and the resources
needed to cover these ‘frictional costs’ will have to be found from within
the announced planning figures by reducing the expenditure on some activity
of higher priority. In these circumstances, councils can bid for the additional
resources needed to protect the higher priority that might otherwise be
threatened.

The application of these principles to the closure of the Nuclear Structure
Facility (NSF) should be clear. I cannot, of course, go into the details
of the bids for extra resources put forward either by councils to the ABRC,
or by the ABRC to the secretary of state but I can assure you that having
concluded that the NSF was no longer of high enough priority to feature
in its baseline expenditure, the Science and Engineering Research Council
did see the need to run down the NSF in an orderly manner, and especially
to cover the first stage of operation of EUROGAM – the Anglo-French gamma-ray
detector.

The ABRC did not, of course, recommend the allocation of resources to
the SERC specifically for the purpose of closing the NSF. The additional
resources allocated to the SERC, in fact, allow the NSF to continue running
until December 1992 without further reductions to the already depleted support
of research grants and studentships.

The primary responsibility for setting scientific priorities rests with
research councils. As the recent government response to the House of Lords
went on to say: ‘The important issue is the need rigorously to appraise
research programmes – both present and proposed – and to decide which are
the highest priorities. This may mean discontinuing important work which
has hitherto enjoyed a high priority, in order to make a start on other
work that has come to be regarded as of even greater importance and priority.
Decisions of this kind will frequently involve hard choices. It would be
unrealistic to expect otherwise.’

It is the ABRC’s responsibility to monitor the effectiveness with which
the research councils are making these hard choices, to judge the relative
importance of the work supported by the different research councils, and
to decide which of their collective bids for additional resources should
be recommended to the secretary of state and in what order of priority.
If, in the aftermath of the Fender report, the SERC chooses to give a different
priority to the nuclear structure programme, one thing is certain. Whether
the government maintains the present baseline for the science budget or
adds to it, keeping the NSF open would mean reducing the planned (or hoped
for) provision for other research that has been judged, hitherto, to be
of higher priority. In such circumstances, the ABRC would no doubt take
the relevant facts into account in framing its next advice to the secretary
of state.

I hope that this account of how the system works will alert all scientific
communities, including the nuclear physicists, to the importance of making
sure that the arguments for giving their disciplines priority treatment
are understood by the wider scientific community and, so far as possible,
by the taxpaying public. Only then will the best judgments be made and the
government and public remain content to leave these hard choices to the
scientific community.

David Phillips is the full-time chairman of the Advisory Board for the
Research Councils.