Is a university without a chemistry department serious about its educational mission? Not according to those who have successfully campaigned to save the department at Sussex University from the axe. "There is no… US university that would dream of damaging its chemistry department," says Ronald Breslow, former president of the American Chemical Society. "It is as fundamental to the core of the universities as are the history and literature departments." The Nobel chemistry laureate Harry Kroto, who spent much of his working life in the Sussex department, contemplated returning his honorary degree from Sussex in protest at the original plan to dismantle the department.
Sussex announced that plan in March, saying that the small student intake and the loss of several staff members made teaching unsustainable. But the university senate agreed to postpone the decision and, following intense criticism from scientists across the country, has now proposed a merger with biochemistry rather than outright closure.
The Sussex chemists have been attempting to establish their viability by attracting funds from industry, private investors and anyone else with spare cash. The target was around £1m, which would have supported a new professor and two lecturers over the next five years. It is not clear if they'll now need to pursue this strategy, which is untested for a British university.
But what does the case tell us about the state of chemistry? Sussex's department may have been saved, but the departments at King's College London and Exeter have not been so lucky. The University of Wales at Swansea is taking no more chemistry undergraduates, and the department at Hertfordshire is "under review." Is this the twilight of chemistry itself, or just the faddishness of today's college applicants?
It is telling that Sussex had planned to replace chemistry with a department of "chemical biology"—a trendy term that is, depending on your perspective, just a new name for biochemistry or a reflection of where chemistry's centre of gravity has shifted. But according to Harry Allcock of Pennsylvania State University, "chemistry is not a branch of biology or of anything else. It is the bedrock discipline on which modern biology, materials science, medicine and parts of engineering are built."
He's right. But that didn't stop Sussex previously naming the department the school of molecular sciences—a hint that at that time a whiff of physics carried more kudos than a dollop of biology.
Bird flu latest
To remind us why we should love them, chemists have recently come up with new ways of making Tamiflu, the antiviral drug that will in theory save us from bird flu if only the pharmacies don't run out of it. Tamiflu is expensive to make, since the key ingredient must be painstakingly extracted from its natural source, star anise. Roche, the maker of Tamiflu, uses 90 per cent of the world's supply of this licorice-flavoured fruit. Now chemists at Harvard and the University of Tokyo have come up with two new ways of making the drug. The Harvard route uses cheap, abundant materials and produces better yields than the current industrial process. Roche has, it seems, been on the phone.
In the meantime, a vaccine for the H5N1 virus—the strain of bird flu that can prove fatal to humans—may be on the way. The first clinical trial began in April last year, testing a vaccine produced by the French company Sanofi Pasteur that uses a modified form of the virus. The results show that the vaccine seems safe and stimulates the required immune response. The problem is that no one really knows what level of antibodies is needed to guarantee protection.
Climate change on Venus
Venus Express, which entered its operational orbit around our neighbouring planet in May, is due to get down to some serious science in early June. Launched in November, this is the partner of the European Space Agency's Mars Express, which has been orbiting earth's other neighbour since 2003. Some of the instruments were adapted from the Mars mission; some were spares, making Venus Express a bargain at £150m. So what is it going to tell us?
The cliché is that Venus presents a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God scenario, a glimpse of an earth gone bad. More or less the same ingredients went into the mix 4.6bn years ago, and the planet is much the same size as ours. It is only a little closer to the sun, and yet today its surface is hot enough to melt lead. The reason is that it experienced a runaway greenhouse effect: heat-trapping vapours rose into the atmosphere, raising the temperature and causing more evaporation until the planet was dry, shrouded in a smothering blanket of acid-laden cloud. That heavy veil obscures our view of the planet, and it was only when radar from the Magellan spacecraft penetrated the clouds a decade ago that we "saw" the surface in all its infernal desolation.
Some point to Venus to illustrate the perils of global warming, and suggest that Venus Express will bring that analogy into focus. But this is a mission for hardcore planetary scientists, dedicated to understanding the composition of the atmosphere and to probing for volcanic activity. We don't need to go to Venus to learn about our problems at home.
