London

British chemistry has lost its cutting edge, says a major review of its performance, and now tends to follow where others lead.

The review — conducted by an international panel for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) — says that chemistry in Britain is “relatively conservative” compared with work in other countries, or even with its own past.

The panel, which was chaired by Harvard chemist George Whitesides, did reach some positive conclusions: the quality of British scholarship is comparable to the world's best, it finds, as are facilities at the top universities. But the chemistry community has failed to embrace multidisciplinary areas of research, such as materials science and chemistry at the interface with biology, it concludes.

“We believe the United Kingdom will benefit if the academic chemistry community becomes more innovative,” says the panel's report, Chemistry at the Centre.

The findings will make uncomfortable reading for British chemists, who are already facing a sharp decline in the number of undergraduate students who are entering the discipline (see Nature 416, 777; 200210.1038/416777b). “We hope this serves as a wake-up call,” says one panel member, who did not want to be identified, “because British chemistry is in danger of becoming marginalized.”

The panel says that one reason many British academic chemists are less concerned with innovation is that they tend to have close ties with the mature chemical industry. It adds that the current funding system cannot support long-term, focused programmes, and that the discipline fails to attract sufficient recruits from overseas.

David Clark, director of research and innovation at the EPSRC, which funds most chemistry in British universities, agrees that “people are playing it safe” in the discipline. The agency will discuss the report at an open meeting at the Geological Society in London on 27 January, and will then draw up an action plan to update its strategy for supporting chemistry, he says.