Gordon F. Kirkbright Bursary 2001

In 1985 a fund was established as a memorial to Gordon Kirkbright in recognition of his contributions to analytical spectroscopy and to science in general. The fund is administered by the Committee of the Association of British Spectroscopists (ABS) and by the ABS Trust. The award enables promising young scientists of any nation to attend a recognised scientific meeting or visit a place of learning.

Applications are invited for 2001 Gordon Kirkbright Bursaries. The award is not restricted to spectroscopists. Full further information contact: John Chalmers, VS Consulting, 14 Croft Hills, Tame Bridge, Stokesley TS9 5NW, UK. Fax: +44 (0)1642 714306; vibspecconsult@aol.com. The closing date for entries is 31 March 2001.

Genomics research

A multinational group of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies is being formed to establish common computing standards for data and information analyses related to gene-based drug development. The lack of a single information standard worldwide prevents intelligent linking and sharing of information developed by different companies, public databases and academic institutions, and is considered to be a major obstacle for more rapid development of gene-based pharmaceutical and other products.

The immediate objectives of the new group, The Biopathways Consortium, include identification of specific needs for informatics standards related to genomics and proteomics research and development of web-based venues for discussion and sharing of relevant software tools. www.biopathways.org.

New lab for Oxford

The ground-breaking ceremony for Oxford University’s new £66 million research laboratory in Mansfield Road took place on 7 September 2000. The Building is partly financed from Britain’s Joint Infrastructure Fund with money from UK government agencies and the Wellcome Trust and major contributions from the Wolfson Foundation and the E.P. Abraham Research Fund. Additional funding is also being sought from industry. The laboratory will house over 400 researchers, 400 fume cupboards and a basement for instrumentation and laboratories with controlled environments. These will be particularly appropriate for the research of the newly elected Professor of Physical Chemistry, Jacob Klein, who joined the Department from the Weizmann Institute in Israel on 1 October 2000.

The research to be conducted in the new laboratory will be grouped into three major themes; synthesis and molecular design, chemical and molecular biology and interfacial and materials science. In addition to the new laboratory, the Department will retain three of its existing laboratories. Professor Graham Richards, Chairman of the Department, said: “We believe that the new laboratory will provide the best possible environment for research and enable us not only to maintain our position as one of the world’s leading Chemistry departments, but to enhance that position and our links with industry.”

Market report

According to a report from SDi, the global analytical instrument industry reached $17.8 billion in revenues in 1999 and is expected to approach $28.1 billion by the year 2004. Growth remained slow in the early 1990s, but began to recover in the mid- to late-90s led by a stronger US economy. Following this trend, the analytical instrument industry is currently forecast to grow at an average annual rate of 9.7% up to 2004. Liquid-phase chromatography continues to be the largest segment of the industry, with annual sales in excess of $3 billion. The fastest-growing technique is Bioinstrumentation. expected to increase at an average rate of 18.0% from 1999 to 2004, followed closely by Laboratory Automation with 14.0%. With the insterest in genomic and proteomics applications. the Mass Spectrometry sector will see annual growth of 12.8%, with individual segments growing considerably faster.

Regionally, growth in North America will outpace other parts of the World at an average annual rate of 10.6%. Europe’s growth, at 9.7% per annum, will increase faster than in either Latin America or Asia Pacific, including Japan.

The report is available from Strategic Directions International, sdi_Europe@strategic-directions.com, www.strategic-directions.com.

Analytical award

Dr E. Hywel Evans, a Principal Lecturer in Analytical Chemistry in the University of Plymouth’s Department of Environmental Sciences, has been awarded the Society of Analytical Chemistry (SAC) Silver Medal for 2000 by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). This ward award is made to a scientist under 35 years of age who has made a significant impact on the research and teaching of Analytical Science, and who shows considerable future potential. Dr Evans was recognised for his work in atomic spectroscopy, particularly in plasma source mass spectrometry.

Chemometrics online

Chemometrics Online is a free educational tool that provides users with various methods of data analysis over the web. Once registered, you can upload your own data files for analysis. Currently, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Principal Component Regression (PCR) and Soft Independent Modelling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) are provided. Results and graphs are provided via the web, and no plug-ins or downloads are required. chemometrics.odu.edu.

European research: key figures

The latest “Key Figures” booklet on European science and technology policy indicators from the European Commission gives detailed information on how Europe performs in terms of growth, employment and competitiveness as compared to the US and Japan. The booklet addresses five major areas of quantitative and statistical analysis comparing the European Union, its Member States, the US and Japan, their research and development efforts and performance in the short and long term.

1. Performance in terms of growth, employment and competitiveness and the respective contribution made by research, technological development and innovation. One of the findings is that in 1999, the high-technology sectors and knowledge intensive services contributed significantly to the improvement in both growth and the employment situation in Europe. These sectors only represent about 20% of employment in the European Union but, based on data available from the Community Labour Force Survey, the rate of growth of employment in these sectors is double the average for the manufacturing sector (1.7% as opposed to 0.9%) and the service sector (6.4% as opposed to 3%).

2. Investment in knowledge—research and development expenditure, education, software—and venture capital investment, i.e. spending patterns in the perspective of the knowledge economy. Available figures provide proof that after a steady decline, the percentage of GDP spent on R&D (intensity of R&D) has been growing steadily between 1994 and 1999 in both the USA (to 2.7%) and Japan (to 3.1%), while it has remained at around 1.8% in the European Union.

3. Human resources in and for science and technology, including certain indicative figures of mobility and attractiveness. The European Union has fewer researchers as a proportion of its work force (5.1%) than the USA (7.4%) and Japan (8.9%). This difference is even more marked if one looks only at the number of researchers employed in industry.

4. Scientific and inventive “output”, innovation and high-tech trade, including a number of regional indicators. The booklet shows that the European Union’s shares of scientific publications world wide (37.8% in 1998) and citations (38.2% in 1998) increase rapidly (respectively 1.7% and 2.1% each year), whereas those of the USA (32.9% for publications and 51% for citations) are declining sharply (respectively –2.1% and –0.9% each year). Although 47% of European patents are from the European Union, it accounts for a much smaller proportion of patents in the American and Japanese systems and the Americans and Japanese have substantially greater shares of patents in the European system.

5. Indicators on the pattern of co-operation in Europe. Patterns of co-operation in innovation activities between European companies vary considerably from one Member State to another; in general, firms in Scandinavian countries co-operate more than those in the other Member States.

A copy of the report in electronic form is available at http://europa.eu.int/ comm/research/pdf/keyfiguresihp.pdf.

A century of measurement

The UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is 100 years old, and this landmark has been celebrated with the launch of a book A Century of Measurement written by Eileen Magnello and published by Canopus Publishing. The book traces the story of NPL, setting it within the context of industrial needs and scientific advances. Achievements of the laboratory include the development of radar during the Second World War, Alan Turing’s pioneering work on the ACE machine (one of the first programmable electronic computers) and Louis Essen’s work on the caesium atomic beam to measure atomic time. The book is illustrated by many remarkable scientific images.