To the editor

I wish to comment on your January editorial (Nature Mater. 2, 1; 2003)1, A matter of survival?, about university education in materials science and engineering (MSE). In particular, to challenge your assertion that the subject is not now being taught as “a coherent and single discipline”.

Many academic departments round the world do in fact teach MSE in just that way. Professor Merton C. Flemings of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has written at some length about this very approach2 and the two of us have written a detailed overview3 of materials education in the USA and Europe, with particular emphasis on the idea of teaching a coherent and single discipline. The MIT faculty, in particular, are in the process of preparing textbooks that span the various categories of materials.

The difficulty of attracting enough students to the discipline is in no way specific to MSE; a number of other scientific disciplines have just the same problem.

I also want to challenge your assertion that countries such as Japan, France and Germany have no dedicated materials departments in their universities. In fact, these countries all have such departments, and in most cases these reveal the fact in their names, but it is true that they are often more specialized than the big 'anglo-saxon' departments, and so some of them do not cover the complete spectrum. All this is discussed at some length in the overview by Flemings and Cahn3.

It may well be that the correct solution to the problem of numbers in MSE lies in the secondary (high) schools, and much attention is currently being paid to this aspect. I would urge you to open your columns to an in-depth debate on the whole problem of recruitment within MSE.