As a graduate Biochemist I'm proud to have studied Chemistry at Bristol University. And I'm proud that my grandfather, who was a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a working chemist at BDH all his life, got me interested in the subject when I was 10 years old. If money was not an issue for me, I might go back to work in a Chemistry lab.
Article (with a few minor & bold edits by Chris Street) from New Scientist, From issue 2568 of New Scientist magazine, 09 September 2006, page 54-55
Something to be proud of
If you had to pick one area of modern chemistry to inspire the next generation to take up the discipline, what would you choose? Anna Gosline asked some of the field's leading lights.
IT IS all too easy to paint a grim picture of chemistry in the UK. Undergraduate enrolment in chemistry courses began to plummet in the late 1990s, bottoming out in 2003 with barely 3000 students. These dwindling numbers, coupled with the high cost of teaching the subject, have led some universities to shut down their departments. Chemists graduating from the University of Exeter, King's College London and Queen Mary, University of London, have all seen windows boarded up behind them.
Countless papers, talks and initiatives have been spawned in an effort to entice students back into the field. Working chemists should venture into classrooms, they say, armed with demonstrations of the big, loud and dangerous reactions of past schooldays. Chemistry teachers should have chemistry degrees to impart their enthusiasm to students, reckons the UK government.
But maybe there is a simpler way to turn the tide: good old-fashioned PR. One way to do this is by demonstrating how chemistry can step up to the challenges of the modern world, be it answering energy needs, addressing climate change or improving our health. So New Scientist polled a selection of leading chemists and asked them what we should be celebrating in today's chemistry, and how this research will answer the future demands of life, just as it has done for the past 200 years.
At the forefront of modern chemistry are new energy technologies. It is up to chemists to sort out an alternative to burning fossil fuels, says Nobel laureate and former president of the Royal Society of Chemistry Harry Kroto. One of the most promising avenues is cheap photovoltaic cells. Solar cells are currently made with silicon, which although abundant on Earth, occurs as silicon dioxide. Refining it to make pure silicon is a costly endeavour, requiring temperatures of up to 1900 °C, meaning that manufacturing a solar cell can consume more energy than the cell eventually produces. Now chemistry is offering the possibility of making photovoltaics from cheap organic polymers, or plastics, such as those developed by Richard Friend at the University of Cambridge. What's more, these thin, flexible materials can essentially be printed out by an ink-jet printer. "The possibility of producing large areas of solar cells by printing them on a printing press sounds like a major breakthrough to me," says Kroto. "At some point we need to design technologies that produce and store energy from the sun at the same rate as we consume it." For Kroto, the ultimate goal would be to take photovoltaics and use them to break apart the highly energetic bond between oxygen and hydrogen in water molecules - producing pure hydrogen fuel.
It will also be chemistry that is ultimately behind technologies to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, says Gerry Lawless, head of the recently reprieved chemistry department at the University of Sussex in Brighton. "Chemists are the only ones who can provide those answers. Our atmosphere is a giant chemical solution." For example, researchers in the US and Canada are working on ways to scrub the atmosphere of excess CO2, based on hydroxides that absorb the gas.
For Martyn Poliakoff who specialises in green chemistry at the University of Nottingham, one of chemistry's most vital frontiers is finding environmentally responsible ways to manufacture chemicals and products. For example, he has collaborated with chemists in Ethiopia and at Procter & Gamble to create plastic bags made from local sugar cane. "If you can do this, then Ethiopia doesn't have to import oil to make petroleum-based plastics, and when the bags are thrown on the ground the cows can just eat them."
Of course, chemistry's future lies not only in energy and materials but also at the molecular level of biology, says Lawless. "Our understanding of biology is deep enough now that we can apply chemical techniques to its study." Take the report in Nature last year by Stephen Fesik at Abbott Laboratories in Chicago. By interfering with the proteins that help cancer cells avoid programmed cell death, or apoptosis, they were able to kill tumours and also improve the efficacy of radiation treatment and chemotherapy. It is thinking like this - at a chemical level - that will advance the next generation of antibiotics, which are desperately needed to fight the growing plague of resistant infections such as MRSA, says Lawless.
For David Lathbury, director of process chemistry at AstraZeneca R&D, the real excitement lies in our new ability to create commercial-scale quantities of medically important natural chemicals. He points to the work of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis with discodermolide, a potent anti-cancer drug isolated from sea sponges,. "They made around 600 grams of that material. Ten or 15 years ago we couldn't have made 6 grams. It was a Herculean effort but it did show how the field has moved on."
The next challenge, says Lathbury, is to use chemistry's powers to create whole tissues, such as synthetic skin that could be used to treat burns. "We know how the protein keratin is made. We know how to make membranes. We know a lot of the basic building blocks of cells. But what sort of completely different molecules could you make that would surpass nature? There is nothing to say that nature has arrived at the ultimate solution."
According to Richard Pike, CEO of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the most exciting prospect for tissue generation lies with nanotechnology. He cites the work of people like Samuel Stupp at Northwestern University in Illinois, who are developing tissue scaffolding from nanofibres that encourages spinal cord regeneration. Stupp injected the spinal cords of paralysed rodents with peptides that then self-assemble to form nanoscale scaffolding, giving new tissue a framework to grow on. What's more, these tiny tubes send chemical signals to neural stem cells to promote neuron development. Within two months, the mice could walk again. "You could do the exact same thing to grow blood vessels or grow bone," says Pike. "To me, that is incredible."
Hopes for nanotech extend well beyond tissue repair. From molecule-sized motors to super-strong nanomaterials, and Kroto's own discovery of C60 carbon "buckyballs", the science of small has been hailed as the next big thing across a range of fields, including medicine, electronics, materials science and computing. No matter what discipline the application ultimately falls in, the science will continue to require precise chemical control. "I don't think we fully appreciate the complexity of bottom-up molecular assembly that is necessary to achieve many of the goals of nanoscience," says Kroto. Chemists have often pointed out that nanotech is chemistry by another name.
This identity crisis pervades the entire field of chemistry. Photovoltaic cells can sound more like engineering. Anti-cancer drugs are seen as medicine or biology. Carbon capture could be atmospheric research, while new plastics might be considered materials science. The breadth of the discipline, coupled with its myriad industrial applications, means that while chemistry really is all around us, few can delineate where the field starts and ends, and that is the crux of the PR problem hastening chemistry's seeming demise. If the public does not see solar cells or tissue regeneration as chemistry, then students and even universities are apt to follow.
The need to demonstrate chemistry's ownership of exciting science has never been greater, and affects more than just this discipline, says Kroto, because even as other fields chip away at what is by rights chemistry's territory, the science of molecular interaction has become more important.
"Many of the major areas of advancement are the now at the molecular level," he says. "In physics, nanotechnology is on the molecular scale. In biology, we have gone into the genome, but understanding the DNA molecule requires an understanding of the chemical bond. If we are not careful, people will be working in these areas without an understanding of chemistry, which is the overarching science. We are going to breed a whole generation of people who don't have a good enough understanding of chemistry to make the technologies for a sustainable future."
Job market snapshot
Growth has been slow in the chemical industries over the past few years, with not only fewer jobs but also fewer graduates applying for entry-level positions. Overall there is still a shortage of qualified technicians, meaning that those with a good degree are well positioned. Pharmaceutical companies continue to offer the best packages for graduates. The UK's chemical industry is also becoming more specialised and entrepreneurial. As a result, the largest jobs boom has been in leadership positions in smaller companies, says Simon Marsh, director of employment relations at the Chemical Industries Association. A new wave of younger leaders also makes for a more flexible, parent-friendly working environment.
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