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THE FEAR that Oxford is losing its ability to compete as a world-class institution expressed by Robert Stevens, master of Pembroke College, is unfounded, the chair of the university's international committee has said.

Dennis Noble, fellow of Balliol College, told 600 Oxford graduates at the biennial North American alumni conference in New York last weekend: "We do have funding problems in the United Kingdom and that it is also true that we don't win Nobel prizes, but that does not mean we can't do world-class science - we certainly can." International collaboration was the strongest guarantor of standards in Oxford science, he said. Letters, page 12