Britain has won the race to produce the first powerful magnet to probe the building blocks of life, thanks to an Oxfordshire company.
Oxford Instruments has built a special laboratory to house the £3m Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometer at Eynsham, where scientists from around the world can try out the new technology.
The laboratory will be opened today by Prof Iain Campbell, from Oxford University department of biochemistry, which hopes to be among the first research units to own one of the magnetic systems.
The 900MHz spectrometer, built jointly with US company Varian, will be open to visiting scientists.
Dr Alan Street, Oxford Instruments Superconductivity's technical director, said: "We hope the lab will be a stepping stone for development efforts leading to an even more powerful tool."
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