This aims to contribute to the debate over the relationship between public
scientific research and industrial innovation, analysing, air particular, t
he importance of distance in the process of knowledge transfer from public
research to industrial innovation. It also examines the evolution of scient
ific specialisation in the chemical and pharmaceutical fields in the four l
argest European countries (the UK, Germany, France, and Italy), the Europea
n Union as a whole, the USA and Japan. The results show that the chemical a
nd pharmaceutical sectors have completely different perceptions of, and mak
e different use of, public research, and that the pharmaceutical sector rel
ies on international, and particularly North American, research much more t
han does the chemical sector, The country-level analysis of specialisation
patterns indicates that the USA has a much more integrated and persistent s
pecialisation profile in medical chemistry and pharmacy & pharmacology than
the other countries.