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In an unprecedented move, the Wellcome Trust has announced it is prepared to contribute £10 million to the costs of a new second-generation synchrotron source, known as Diamond, at the Daresbury laboratories in Cheshire, England.

The offer comes as various research councils have been asked by the Office of Science and Technology to give their views on a replacement for Daresbury's current 2-GeV Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) which becomes obsolete early in the next decade.

The heavy use of the facility by researchers has left little doubt that the research councils will be positive. But that will leave open the question of who is prepared to pay for what.

Current estimates are that a new storage ring will cost £100 million — a sum the research councils hope will be found by central government — and that experimental beam lines would cost another £40 million, which the research councils might find out of their own budgets.

Officials of Wellcome Trust have in the past said that the trust should not be expected to make up for the government's failures to maintain a healthy research infra-structure, so the trust may be reluctant to contribute towards the costs of the ring itself.

Despite this uncertainty, David Norman, director of the SRS facility, says he hopes the Wellcome offer will “catalyse” thinking about the value of the facility both in the research councils and in government circles.