A nobel prize winner yesterday said he would send his honorary degree back to the University of Sussex after learning its chemistry department is to close.

The university told staff and students it was scrapping chemistry degrees and cutting staff at the department last Friday.

The department will be renamed chemical biology and drop half of its 14 staff.

Nobel Prize winner Sir Harry Kroto said he would send back his honorary degree and insist the university took his name off its "propaganda" when he heard the news.

Dr Gerry Lawless, who has just resigned from his post as head of chemistry, said: "Chemistry is the base of all other biological sciences.

"We need to have a core of highly qualified chemists to run everything else from.

"To teach off-shoots such as chemical biology without also teaching chemistry is ridiculous."

He said applications were up 40 per cent on last year with 350 applicants chasing 25 places.

Professor Philip Parsons, who patented his synthetic version of the natural antibiotic laconamycin to combat MRSA and Dr Penny Chaloner, who runs a popular one-year premedical course, have announced they intend to leave the university.

Royal Society for Chemistry chief executive Dr Richard Pike said: "No university can claim to be a real university without chemistry.

"It is a universally-accepted premise that chemistry is the central science in the absence of which there is a void that affects a campus."

A spokeswoman from the university said the chemistry department had lost researchers and had no guarantee of sustained or viable student numbers.

She said: "Although student applications have risen this year due to our league table standings, applications do not translate into offers being accepted.

"Out of 300 offers made we could expect an intake at the very best of 35 to 40.

"We have achieved intakes of only 20 a year in recent years."

She said retaining the chemistry department would cost an extra £750,000 which could be better spent elsewhere, such as in biosciences and the arts.

President of the students' union Roger Hylton said: "The decision is repugnant. "The chemistry department is ranked second in the country in The Guardian and sixth in The Times and has an international pedigree.

"Chemical biology has less student recruitment, less money and lower academic standards for entry and there hasn't been any research to see if this is the right decision."

He said that, although the university had promised to honour all current chemistry degrees, students were worried about teaching standards when staff are laid off.

Mr Hylton said the students' union was going to ask the university senate - the highest academic decision making body - to throw out the plans at a meeting on Friday.

The union is calling for vice chancellor Alasdair Smith and Jonathan Bacon, the dean of life sciences, to resign.

Sir Harry Kroto was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1996 for codiscovering fullerenes - a new class of molecules.

Sir John Cornforth, now retired, received the prize in 1976 for his work on stereochemistry and enzyme-catalysed reactions.

Similar changes and closures have already been made at chemistry departments at Exeter University, King's College London, Queen Mary's London, Dundee and Surrey.