Get planning, physics head tells synchrotron users

Potential users of Australia's national synchrotron need to start planning now, according to Sir Peter Williams, president of the UK Institute of Physics and proponent of the synchrotron project.

"In five years time, the synchrotron will be giving out its first light," said Williams on a visit to Melbourne on Friday. "It's the infrastructure that surrounds it that will determine how it is used."

Williams said that the major users of Diamond, the UK synchrotron project, were already planning on-site facilities. "You have to think in terms of the ancillary infrastructure. It needs planning and it needs thought early."

The synchrotron will also act as a technology magnet creating a cluster of research and technology around it, Williams said. He explained that while big pharmaceutical and manufacturing companies would use the synchrotron, these days smaller companies and start-ups developed a lot of new technology.

One way to encourage this, he said, was by building business incubator facilities on site.

"It will create its own industry around it, given time, but it won't happen overnight," Williams explained.

According to Williams, life sciences users of the synchrotron will be an important group and should not be forgotten during the planning and development of the facility.

Its major life science use would be for crystallography - the most powerful way to examine the structure of small molecules, proteins and even viruses.

The use of a synchrotron for X-ray crystallography makes the technique as routinely available as another "off-the-shelf" method - nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), says Williams.

"The classical view of pharmaceuticals 50 years ago was chemically based. The modern world is structurally driven," he explained. "The first line of attack in modern structure-based drug design is a stereochemical insight."

Williams said the synchrotron was vitally important to the biopharmaceutical industry in Australia, and made a statement to big pharmaceutical companies that Australia was serious about its industry.

"Any Australian ambitions in the biopharmaceutical industry would be stillborn without a synchrotron," he said. "It's like not having a light microscope in the 19th century."

Williams was in Australia for a physics conference and has been meeting business leaders in Sydney and Melbourne to brief them on potential industrial opportunities that will arise once the synchrotron is up and running.