Chemistry's grand challenges

A 'grand challenge' goes beyond what can be achieved by a single research team or in the span of a single research grant. It is what could be achieved in the next 20-40 years if researchers from different research groups, disciplines or institutions were to work together. Such challenges, according to the EPSRC, are defined by their potential to be world research leaders, to provide a step change in current knowledge and for their exploitation of novel and ambitious research methodologies. The Council cites as an example the human genome project, which took many teams of people to identify all 25 000 genes and determine the three billion base pairs in human DNA, and led to other important successes on the way.