In this week's issue, prominent chemists identify six important questions currently being asked on the frontiers of their field (see page 500). The calibre of the selection demonstrates clearly that the discipline remains alive with fresh ideas and challenges.

However, chemistry's poor public image, dogged by echoes of industrial pollution and the pejorative connotations of the word 'synthetic', has led to suggestions that it rebrand itself with a sexier label — molecular sciences, perhaps. The idea is not just public-relations flannel: it is also a response to the undoubted movement of the discipline's centre of gravity since Johann Hartmann took the first university chair of chemistry at Marburg in Germany in 1609.

There are plenty of precedents. In recent decades, many geologists have become 'Earth scientists', some metallurgists are now materials scientists, and biology departments have splintered into all manner of subdivisions. Most of these renamings are down to more than fashion; they reflect a genuine shift in emphasis.

But there are strong arguments that 'chemistry' remains the best word to describe the sciences of matter and its transformations. Far from being an endangered subject, chemistry is a victim of its own success. It has given us the tools and concepts, for example, to probe questions in the life sciences that were previously impenetrable.

As a label, 'biochemistry' fails to do justice to this encroachment of chemistry into biology, being associated primarily with the study of enzyme kinetics. Similarly, chemists can now design materials from the atomic level upwards, whether they work in departments of chemical engineering, polymer science or materials. Chemists may even give electronic engineers a run for their money in creating self-assembling circuits and memories.

The problem is that so little of the credit falls on chemistry itself. 'Chemical biology', for example, presents the chemical aspect as an adjunct to another discipline, while a great deal of inventive chemistry comes under the umbrella of nanotechnology. This tendency is already reflected in university reshuffles, at Harvard and elsewhere, that might displace parts of chemistry to other departments.

Such rebranding is not the way to secure chemistry's position as an independent discipline. Neither will that be achieved merely by loudly trumpeting chemistry's considerable achievements. Chemistry needs, instead, to reassert itself as a core scientific discipline — albeit one that is inherently interdisciplinary and has a strong applied component. Perhaps it is time for chemistry departments to rethink the subject's internal structure: the traditional divisions of physical, organic and inorganic chemistry have long since become irrelevant in many respects.

Another challenge for chemists is to be ambitious in defining the discipline's boundaries, particularly in relation to the life sciences. And in terms of public perception, chemistry has to find a way of establishing its centrality in the mysterious process we call life.