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Dexter: an ‘essential’ tool. Credit: WELLCOME TRUST

Christmas has come early this year to the 3,000 British users of synchrotron radiation with the announcement that the Wellcome Trust is to provide £100 million (US$163 million) towards the cost of a new synchrotron facility.

The figure represents well over half of the anticipated construction costs of Diamond, the 3-GeV X-ray synchrotron machine planned as a successor to the world's first dedicated X-ray source, the 2-GeV Synchrotron Radiation Source at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire.

Britain's research councils are expected to agree shortly to put up the remaining sum. They had been baulking at the prospect of having to finance the total construction cost and had been frantically seeking other possible sources of funding — including even resorting to bank loans.

The Wellcome announcement came as part of a broad £1.1 billion package of additional support for science announced on Monday (13 July) by Margaret Beckett, the cabinet minister responsible for science (see above).

The trust's interest in contributing towards the cost of the facility had been known since last November, when it announced that it would give £10 million towards the project (see Nature 389, 318; 1997). The move was seen as a bid to catalyse decision-making in government circles.

It appears to have succeeded. Monday's unexpected announcement that Wellcome had decided to increase its contribution by an order of magnitude has been met with surprise and delight in the synchrotron research community, whose members range from structural biologists to materials scientists.

“I am enormously pleased,” says Guy Dodson, professor of chemistry at the University of York. “It is a remarkable commitment which means that the next generation of biologists and physicists can now be certain of having a level playing field in comparison with facilities available in the United States and elsewhere.”

Mike Dexter, the new director of the Wellcome Trust, points out that the ability of synchrotron radiation to resolve the structure of small molecules has made it an essential tool for structural biologists.

This is a field in which Britain has many top-level researchers, including John Walker, last year's Nobel prize winner for chemistry (see Nature 389, 771; 1997). “We are determined to see that we keep these scientists in the United Kingdom, and ensure that they have the resources necessary to continue competing with the best in the world,” says Dexter.