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fork(2) [soylentnews.org] writes:

      Today, for a change (for those of us in the US), someone else's national embarrassment was held up for all the world to see.

      Writing in Science this morning (June 24) Daniel Clery [sciencemag.org] said, "Science and technology were not a major talking point during the referendum campaign, but numerous scientists and research organizations urged voters to preserve the United Kingdom's E.U. membership." The British research community has strongly argued that Brexit is a serious threat to funding and innovation. Earlier this week Debora MacKenzie of the MIT Technology Review [technologyreview.com] said:

Polls say 83 percent of British scientists oppose Brexit. Many have spoken out: in March all 159 Fellows of the Royal Society at the University of Cambridge called the move "a disaster for British science," mainly because it would stop young scientists from migrating freely within Europe. A report by the House of Lords reported in April that "the overwhelming balance of opinion from the UK science community" opposed Brexit.

      Why? Partly because the EU funds a lot of science and technology research for its member countries, with 74.8 billion euros budgeted from 2014 to 2020. Brexiters say British taxpayers should simply keep their contribution and spend it at home.

      They'd take a serious loss if they did. Britain punches above its weight in research, generating 16 percent of top-impact papers worldwide, so its grant applications are well received in Brussels. Between 2007 and 2013, it paid 5.4 billion euros into the EU research budget but got 8.8 billion euros back in grants.

      Anne Glover, the Dean for Europe at Aberdeen University said [theguardian.com], "Our success in research and resulting impact relies heavily on our ability to be a full part of European Union science arrangements and it is hard to see how they can be maintained upon a Brexit."

      Indeed, it is the cross-pollination that results from that free movement of scientists, their students, and their ideas that has helped to fuel such dramatic recent advances in science in Europe as the Higgs boson particle. Such collaborative projects as the Human Brain Project [wikipedia.org], and the world's most advanced magnetic-containment fusion experiments at ITER [wikipedia.org] are enormously aided by the absence of the kind of international barriers that Brexit will give rise to.

      The Vox [vox.com] news website says, "Brexit will immediately destabilize our ongoing European Union-funded multi-center studies," summed up Rustam Al-Shahi Salman, a professor of clinical neurology at the University of Edinburgh. In particular, Al-Shahi Salman said, the future of any project currently being set up or seeking funding is now far less certain, because all such projects were planned under EU regulation."
      This echos Deborah Mackenzie's earlier article in MIT Tech Review:

Brexiters argue that Britain can continue to participate in EU research from outside, under an "association agreement." Several non-EU countries, like Norway and Tunisia, do that. Would it work for a major research nation?

      Ask the Swiss. They are not in the EU, but in 2004 they allowed free movement of people to and from the EU, partly to qualify for EU research programs. In 2014, under the same anti-immigration pressure that pushed Britain to the Brexit vote, 50.3 percent of Swiss voted to repeal that. At the time, no one mentioned how this might affect science.

      But Swiss students were summarily dropped from the EU's Erasmus University exchange program, which is much used by young scientists. Swiss labs are major participants in EU science -- one leads its flagship Human Brain Project -- and the research ministry stepped in to rescue work stranded as EU funding was abruptly withdrawn. Brussels agreed to give the Swiss temporary "partial association," with access to some programs mainly for basic research.

      That will end in February, however, and the EU insists that for full association, Switzerland, like Norway, must agree to the free movement of people -- putting the Swiss back where they started. Without full association, it will have to pay its own way to participate in EU research projects.

      [...]

      The EU's 3.3-billion-euro Innovative Medicines Initiative is not now open to the Swiss. The pharmaceutical industry, the largest business investor in British R&D, told the Lords it fears Brexit will mean British labs will follow. Britain is a major player in pharmaceutical research; that means slower progress towards badly needed new drugs.

      Dr Andrew Sheperd says [euronews.com], "The union of European states has been a powerful force for good and for progress, and many of the achievements it has made possible could not have been accomplished by nations alone."

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