Recruitment has started in Oxfordshire for Britain's biggest scientific project for more than 30 years.

The £235m Diamond project, due to open at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, near Didcot, in 2006, will employ at least 200 people.

Programme manager Trefor Edwards said: "We are actively recruiting both engineering and administration staff and it is just the start of a recruitment campaign which will increase to 50 by the end of the year and 200 by 2006."

On top of that, several hundred workers will work on the massive building project, when it starts in the autumn.

Tenders are about to go out for the multi-million pound construction contracts.

When it is finished, the atom-smashing machine will create seven "beamlines" of light and X-rays, allowing scientists to probe the structure of matter. It will be particularly useful as a follow-up to the Human Genome Project, which listed all the genes in the human body. Diamond will allow scientists to look at the protein molecules which make up the genes and investigate how diseases start.

Each beamline -- an array of mirrors, lenses and filters -- provides light of different wavelength and intensity. Up to 24 beamlines are planned as the project expands.

Thousands of biologists, chemists, physicists, materials, earth and environmental scientists from universities all over Britain will conduct experiments on Diamond.

Diamond chief executive Prof Gerhard Materlik, who previously ran a similar machine in Hamburg, is determined to get it built to time and to budget. Detailed planning permission will be sought soon. The project is coming to RAL following a battle with its fellow Government laboratory, Daresbury in Cheshire.

Merseyside MPs urged the Government to site Diamond in the North, because of the boost to jobs and the economy.

But Stephen Byers, then Trade and Industry Secretary, decided that RAL had more experience.