Physics World. Hello, and welcome to the Physics
World Stories podcast. I'm Andrew Glester. And in
this episode, we're gonna be hearing about how
political wranglings between the UK and the European
Union have been affecting
UK science.
We'll hear from someone who has been advising
the government on their science and research strategy.
And we'll hear from 2 researchers whose work
has been significantly affected
by this political
situation.
Way back in June 2016,
the UK voted
to leave the European Union
in a move which has been tagged as
Brexit.
To say it's been divisive before and after
the vote is something of an understatement.
The vote itself was very close. Just 52%
against 48%
voting to leave the collaboration
that is the European Union.
With the politicians
supporting Brexit claiming that they would be able
to take back control,
It wasn't exactly clear to many people what
Brexit meant. We were simply told that Brexit
means Brexit. This idea of taking back control
though and this idea of collaboration
is something that's key to science and and
UK
research as we'll find in this podcast.
Horizon Europe is the European Union's research and
innovation funding program due to run until 2027.
It has a budget of €95,500,000,000
just under that in dollars,
and as it currently stands, just under £83,000,000,000.
That money is divided among the EU's 27
member states
and 14
associate nations.
Horizon Europe officially began in 2021
and at the end of that year, it
was agreed that the UK would become an
associate member as part of the trade deal
between the UK
and the European Union. But that agreement has
become somewhat embroiled
in the negotiations about how trade works in
Northern Ireland, something quite different and far removed
from science research.
As we'll hear, as the politicians argue and
debate,
scientists are left in something of a limbo
with the finances
also on hold.
But first, I wanted to get a sense
of how these political wranglings
have been affecting
scientists themselves.
Here's Rachel Armstrong.
I'm professor of regenerative architecture at KAU Leuven,
which is based in Belgium. It's one of
the biggest but the oldest university there.
And,
what I do is I
am
teaching architecture students about the future of the
built environment, thinking about next generation
sustainability.
And in order to do that,
I participate
in
European projects,
so often as a coordinator
where I'm working in very ambitious
multi
disciplinary
teams
that include physicists, engineers,
biologists,
urbanists,
ICT specialists,
companies,
and NGOs.
So it's it's it's a it's a mix
of
inputs, and I think the
amazing thing of being part of a
European Union
project,
which is absolutely priceless,
is intercultural
exchange.
So that people coming from different backgrounds,
using
different languages,
different perspectives, different
mythologies,
different
ambitions in terms of,
you know, their their own contributions,
is incredibly
enriching
just from a very
personal perspective.
And so it's
really a very healthy diverse network
where I think we find a lot of
complementarity.
And
even when we write unsuccessful
bids,
the learning that goes on in the very
process of doing that is
incredibly,
personally,
develop you know, the the personal development that
that goes into that is,
you know,
beyond anything that I can get out of
doing an online course in something or writing
something on my own. So I feel incredibly
lucky to be participating in this in this
kind of work.
And I think that,
in terms of,
the the partnerships,
and,
the knowledge
that can be transferred,
out of these conversations,
is really where we need to be in
terms of facing the big challenges that we
we we find ourselves right in the middle
of right now. Before we get into that,
can you just tell me a bit more
about your research?
So the built environment
contributes 40%
to total global,
carbon emissions,
which comprises,
embodied carbon which is in the building
and then
the building operation so that using energy,
using resources
in order to conduct the activities
of daily life.
And at the moment the built environment
works on a paradigm that's been set by
modern industrial
development
which is resource consumptive.
It imagines
that innovation
can be conducted
without any limits on energy consumption
so that
energy in some ways becomes the solution to
every problem that we have from climbing a
set of stairs
to cooling our food
to
moving around
a space
so that
so that there's a very particular kind of
innovation that we have become habituated to
and that these paradigms
are really holding us in a situation of
more of the same but trying to
mitigate some of the damage
by
being a little bit more thoughtful about when
and how we
use things, which often means that the weakest
and poorest members of society
end up as being the ones that go
without
rather than the
people that have become wealthy,
from these exploitative systems.
So the ambition that we have in the
built environment
is really how are we going to change
the fundamental paradigms
that
that support our
urban existence
so that
we can be
almost
unconsciously
aware of better resource use,
smarter relationships
with the
obligatory
need for us to consume things. We're living
creatures,
we're not closed systems,
we have a metabolism
and we do need to consume
but we need
apparatuses
and devices that help our activities of daily
living to do so in a way that
is enlivening for our environment
and not fundamentally
destructive.
So in order to create that change we
need ambitious
groups of thinkers coming from multiple
disciplines
that can simultaneously
think about the science that's underpinning
the emerging technologies that can help us do
this.
So can we have more biologically
compatible
and
discursive
forms of technology
that help us negotiate
resource circularity
rather than demand
certain kinds of resources.
But we also
need the social and cultural interfaces
that help us relate
to and understand how to use these technologies
and how we can
develop an economics
that the distribution
of resource
that comes from the incorporation of these new
technologies
and the social systems that emerge from them
to actually make a fairer society
so that we're not leaving
poor and marginalised
people
at
the
at the very edges
of what might be considered to be a
good livable
existence on a planet that is incredibly stressed
and undergoing multiple environmental
catastrophes.
I didn't want this podcast to be entirely
about the political situation, so I hope you
don't mind that we're just sharing some of
the important and interesting research. But also, this
podcast is about the impact of Brexit.
Here's Rachel again. Well, in 2016,
I was actually at a
a workshop
at the Robert Rauschenberg,
Foundation working with a team of wonderful,
thinkers and creative artists,
thinking about our responses to climate change. It
was called the Rising Waters CONFAB
and it was led by an artist called
Buster Simpson. And whilst I was out there
I was hearing,
I mean I wasn't aware of the Brexit
referendum because
I'd paid almost
no attention to politics until that point. Because
effectively, you know, I'd grown up in a
society where, yes, there was the Thatcher years
and,
yes, we had a Labour government then followed
by another Conservative
government. But on the whole, it felt like
there were
swings and balances
in place. That if we had too much
of looking after the economy,
then another movement came along that started to
look after people.
So I
felt fairly
comfortable
about the political situation in the UK.
That changed in 2016 and I remember being
asked by the Director
of
the,
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, are you not worried
about this Brexit referendum?
And I completely dismissed it. I said, oh,
don't be silly. You know, it's it's,
it's a a a group of right wingers
that are making a lot fuss about the
European Union. The majority of people in the
UK are not right that right wing.
And,
I'm you know, when there's the referendum,
I'm sure that most people will want to
be a part of a European community.
By this time I'd already started the living
architecture project which was the first,
EU project that I coordinated. I've been part
of other projects before then. This is the
first that I coordinated.
And as I returned to the UK and
the implications
of this Brexit
started to unfold,
and I realized that the,
the second referendum wasn't coming
and
that
the hostilities
about the nationalistic
hostilities
that were being enacted you know in the
media,
in conversations,
you know
things that had had really been dealt with
and suppressed socially. You know, Britain was multicultural
and and and and didn't really like this
kind of white nationalism.
But now it started to to to show
its its its kind of ugly face and
seem to be given space to grow. So,
figures like Nigel Farage,
were incredibly divisive.
And,
the irritation that I felt, you know, with
the promotion of these extreme points of views
is as if this was part of a
normal conversation
really started to jar. And the government didn't
seem to be putting any of this back
in its box. And by the time that
we reached 2019,
I had made a firm decision
that the incredible
experiences and relationships
and the future of my own research and
personal development
was now at stake because the government seemed
to be playing games
with what Brexit actually meant
and that made it impossible for me to
plan. I didn't know if we were going
to be an associated country, whether we weren't
going to have any part at all in
the Horizon Europe projects
or what my status as an international researcher
was going to be. And I also wanted
to protect
the teams of people that
I'd already started to work with on this
journey as a coordinator.
So 20 2019 was a tipping point for
me,
where the government took a turn where it
looked like we were going to go for
the hardest
possible
imaginable
Brexit. We still didn't really know what that
meant
and,
I just thought
I really can't risk this. I can't risk
the damage to,
my career, my relationships
and also to
the the future
of the work that I wanted to be
able to
develop
because
having then worked, you know, we pretty much
completed the living architecture project in 2019 then
and there were opportunities to roll on some
of these developments and the living architecture project
just to put it in the context of
the work I was doing,
was a platform that was really looking to
take us off fossil fuel dependency,
working on a lower energy
understanding
of a household,
installing a circular economy
through a series of bio
reactors,
so microbial fuel cells
and photobioreactors
using microorganisms
to harvest energy
from
light
and household waste
and reuse that in creative ways as if
it's being transformed through the soil
back in the household.
And so the developments in this, I mean,
it was a challenge to get through the
project. It was ambitious.
It did require us to work through some
logical
and
practical knots, but we got there and I
think in 2019
we really felt like we were an integrated
team.
So so this was very important to me
to in order to be able to address
the big challenges that we were facing
that I needed a research platform that would
enable this and wouldn't become protectionist
and and kind of constrain
British researchers only to working with British
partners
or
to be on the receiving end of invitations
from European partners that were then the coordinators
putting together their vision of
the future of our societies
and you know how we were going to
tackle
things like climate change so that we we
would be followers
and and not visionaries in this, you know,
in in the most incredible,
research fund, I think, in in in the
world. There is there is no other fund
that that we have access to,
like the European Union's Horizon Europe Programme.
And I wanted to be part of that
that much that, yes, I decided,
to look for a a job abroad.
And very fortunately, I landed 1 at at
Kai Uleven. I I have I have have
have absolutely no regrets in doing that. And,
yeah, I I and and and I'm here
to help my my British collaborators
as well. We'll come back to Rachel on
both the desire and difficulties
of involving the UK scientists
later in the podcast.
It's safe to say that Brexit has been
politically damaging to individuals
not least to consecutive
prime ministers.
The conservative prime minister
David Cameron who announced that the referendum on
Brexit would take place and was still prime
minister when the results came in resigned on
the back of those results.
His successor
also the conservative
Theresa May resigned after not being able to
get a Brexit deal through parliament.
She was replaced by another conservative prime minister
Boris Johnson
whose tenure as prime minister ended recently after
a series of scandals.
He had promised an oven ready deal for
Brexit
which would just need to be ratified.
The fact that that wasn't quite true is
where these difficulties for Horizon Europe and UK
scientists
are centered. From University College London, here's professor
Graham Reid, who's been advising the government
on their UK science policy.
I'm professor of science and research policy at
UCL,
and I've taken an interest in
the the impact of Brexit
on research and innovation
since,
before the,
referendum on, EU membership, in fact. And,
so I've been,
I I've worked as an adviser to the
House of Lords Science and Technology Committee during
a couple of inquiries
on Brexit. And,
together with sir Adrian Smith, I wrote a
report for the
science minister of the day
about what the UK
should do in the event that we do
not associate with Horizon Europe. So this has
been a a long standing,
point of interest for me.
Professor Graham Reed studied physics at Robert Gordon
University
and then began his career at the National
Engineering Laboratory,
where he worked for almost 10 years.
I wondered how it worked when you're advising
the government and the House of Lords. Yeah.
So with the House of Lords, I was
asked by the the House of Lords committee
to,
help them
develop
an inquiry
into
the UK's relationship with the EU
on science.
So I
I I if you watch these parliamentary committees
on television, you see a sort of horseshoe
shaped table with committee members around it, and
then some poor soul at the end of
the horseshoe who's being grilled.
Well,
I sat along with the committee on that
horseshoe table, but I was there to advise
the chairman and the committee members
on which witnesses should be called to give
evidence
and what sort of questions they should be
asked and how to make sense of the
sort of material that was coming in.
So at no time was I a member
of the house of lords, but I did
get you know, it was a marvelous
insight
into the back office of parliament. Tell me
a bit about your insight then. What did
you find out?
That committee decided
before the inquiry began
that it was not going to be
partisan on the question. It wanted to discover
the evidence,
rather than try to reach a view
on whether or not the UK should associate
with Horizon Europe. There was lots of debate
about that, there were loads of opinions
bashing about the place,
but it was actually quite light on evidence.
And so they they
scrutinized
both quantitative
and qualitative
evidence
about what the UK's relationship with the EU
actually is on science.
And that proved
more complicated
than I had imagined.
The thing that well, there were two things
that impressed me about that experience.
The first was the level of expertise
on the committee,
which was frankly awesome.
There were
highly distinguished
people
with a mixture of career backgrounds,
some of them academic,
some of them industrial,
some of them financial,
but a huge body of expertise.
And the other thing that struck me about
that committee was that I I spent months
working with them on this inquiry.
And I would say for for most of
them, to this day, I don't know where
they stand on the EU because they just
left that outside the door.
They they stuck to
rigorous
evidence gathering and appraisal,
and I was I was really taken by
how much they were able to leave the
politics outside the door when they did the
inquiry.
In my conversations around this topic, I found
that that's certainly not true for everybody. And
I asked professor Graham Reid what his perception
is of this relationship. The the first thing
I'd have to say is that
any discussion about this
tends to provoke
quite strong emotional responses.
It's very difficult
to have a dispassionate
objective discussion about something
that is so emotional in nature.
Almost all the language that's used is pejorative,
whether whether it's meant to be or not.
And the
academic community
have, from the outset,
been
almost unanimous
in their desire for the UK to remain
an EU member.
And after the UK left,
the they be they became unanimous
in a desire for the UK to associate
with Horizon Europe.
And that's a mixture
of,
pragmatic
career experience
in partnerships with European,
scientific institutions,
and
there's personal political dispositions
about the UK's relationship with the EU.
So I and I've said to people before,
it's pretty difficult to get a bunch of
academics to agree on anything.
And and here is a topic where you
will find more or less universal agreement that
has been sustained over a period of 6
years.
So it's quite it's got that distinctive characteristic
of pulling the whole academic community together into
one place.
It suggests to me if the whole of
the academic community
pretty much thinks it's the right thing to
do, the likelihood is it's the right thing
to do.
Well, it's it's it's the right thing to
do from the perspective
of the academic community, but that's not the
only perspective on the decision.
And therein lies the problem.
Horizon
Europe
is different
to the previous
European programs, and our relationship
is different
with to to with Europe.
So
under the terms of the deal that was
struck in 2019
when we left the European Union,
any participation in Horizon Europe
would
be,
on sort of 1 pound going into Europe
and 1 pound coming back out again. So
the UK would not make a profit or
a loss from our participation.
So the cost of participation
would be paid for
by the UK government.
And for the first time ever,
that cost would be tensioned
against other ways of spending the money.
So for 40 years,
participation in framework programs and things was more
or less free money.
You know, you you joined, and the money
just flowed back out again because it was
paid for as part of the UK's subscription
to the EU.
It was all covered in our annual subscription
bill.
Now
if we were to associate,
the cost would have to be paid for
in a discrete package.
So you would be asking ministers
to send a check to Brussels
for
about £2,000,000
a year,
which is money that can't then be spent
on something else.
So the so the politics of this has
changed profoundly
in a way that's not always recognized
in the discussion about Horizon Europe.
Okay. So that's interesting. So, essentially,
the the act of Brexit and the deal
that happened means
that we're not arguing about the same thing
anymore, and we're not going to go back
on that, really. That's not gonna happen anytime
soon.
So what's what can we do then? What
is there a replacement? About about a year
ago,
the the government
committed
to,
a very large sum of money,
which would be made available
for
UK alternatives
to Horizon Europe
in the event that we do not associate.
When I say a large amount of money,
you know, it's it's about
£2,000,000
a year.
So this is this is a lot of
money.
That money
can either be used to pay for association,
in which case we send the money to
Brussels, and then it comes back to us
through our participation in European programs.
Or,
and it's an
or,
that same money can be used
for some program that is run out of
the UK
for
international collaboration.
And that decision
as to whether or not we
go into to to Horizon
or
do a domestic alternative,
that decision hasn't yet been reached, but it
is it there are signs that it's coming
to a head. In any direction? Do you
can you give me a stare on that?
Right. So yeah. I mean, that's there's there's
your key question.
And, you know, I think
if if I was to guess at the
direction, then my guess would be out of
date by the time this podcast was posted,
because it keeps flip flopping around. But let
me give you some of the component
parts of this, some of the some of
the politics.
When we left the EU,
part of the agreement
was that the UK would associate with Horizon
Europe. That was actually baked into the deal
we did with Brussels.
But there were lots of other things that
were baked into that deal as well,
including some arrangements for Northern Ireland.
Now
Brussels argues that we have broken the deal
on Northern Ireland,
and we argue that Brussels has broken the
deal on Horizon Europe.
So each is accusing the other of breaking
the deal on a different bid.
There are formal proceedings
underway,
at the moment
where, you know,
Brussels is sort of,
taking proceedings against the UK on Northern Ireland,
and we are taking proceedings
against Brussels on on horizon Europe. So, you
know, it's
you know, this relationship is quite delicate. Prime
minister Liz Choss,
and business secretary Jacob Rees Mogg, who, of
course, is now the secretary of state responsible
for the science budget.
You know, they've both got had quite clearly
expressed views on Europe, and they will be
key decision makers.
So you can you can deduce from that
what you will,
with with the trust government
taking shape,
I won't be surprised
if this gets brought to our head. It's
been lingering
for far too long.
It needs to be resolved.
We're in the worst of all possible positions
at the moment, where we're neither
in EU programs,
nor are we spending the available money
on a domestic alternative.
The money is just sitting there in a
treasury bank account where it's doing no use
for anyone. So Jacob Briesmog is a slightly,
a person who divides opinion, should we say.
People have differing views on him. He is,
as I understand it, minister for
business, energy,
and industrial strategy. How does the science budget
fit into into that? The science budget,
like any other block of public spending,
is
it's it's
size
is determined by the Treasury,
and its administration
is determined by a government department.
And in and for many years,
the science budget has been,
the responsibility
of the business department.
The business department has taken on lots of
different shapes, and there's been you know, the
names have changed and all the rest of
it, but actually the that budget
sits in the business department,
and they then hand it over to UKRI
and to,
the to of the the the to to
other
institutions.
But the secretary of state
who's responsible for the science budget is now
Jacob Rees Mogg as of a day or
2 ago.
So he's a big player in this. He
will,
I imagine he will, have
a junior minister, the science minister,
who will have a closer day to day
oversight.
But at cabinet level,
at that key decision making level,
it will be, the secretary of state.
And something
like Horizon Association
is sufficiently
complicated
and high profile
and expensive
for it to, I think, be decided at
cabinet level.
In the Physics World Magazine this month and
online, you'll find an article by Michael Allen
entitled UK Science Dips Below the Horizon. And
you can find much more about this topic
there, including learning that Lord John Krebs
who co authored a report in early August
from the House of Lords Science Technology Committee
said that the lack of clear strategy
to realize the government's ambition to make the
UK a technology and science
global superpower
felt a little like setting off on a
marathon with your shoelaces tied together,
and cautioned that the danger was that the
UK would become a bureaucracy superpower
rather than a science superpower. Let's get back
to some actual science, shall we? Here's Karen
Kirby.
I lead the proton therapy
research work in Manchester between the University of
Manchester and the Christie NHS Foundation Trust. The
role was set up in 2015 when I
joined,
the group. And the idea was, the NHS
had invested
over 250,000,000
in proton therapy. NHS doesn't fund research.
And therefore, my job was to build up
a research capability in Manchester
in the clinical proton therapy center,
to, you know, develop a research
activity, which would basically keep the NHS at
the cutting edge.
Proton therapy is a type of radiotherapy. It's
part of the toolbox.
And it the way it goes the way
protons stop in matter means that they deposit
less damage as they go in,
and then they come to a stop with
something called the Bragg peak. So, the idea
is, so you put most of the damage
into the tumor, which you want to kill,
and you put less damage into the surrounding
healthy tissue,
which you don't want to damage because that
causes side effects in patients. Is it just
people in Manchester who are doing this research?
Effectively, we act as a national center. So
we were really lucky. So the NHS so
3 of the rooms are used as clinical
gantries and treat patients every day. And the
4th room, the Christie Charity,
raised money in the northwest predominantly.
And so we have a wonderful research room,
so we can emulate the clinical beam in
the research room, but we don't use it
to treat patients. But we can effectively,
do research work on clinical beam. So we
can do biology, we can do physics, we
can do engineering. And the whole idea is
that that research then feeds into a pipeline
that goes into the clinic,
so that we can benefit patients.
We have, a sister center in London, which
opened last December.
And
so we work with people in London. They
don't have they have a,
a gantry
like the one that's used to treat patients.
We have a bespoke research room.
They do this as well, obviously. Could you
tell me a bit about,
the sort of patients who might be benefiting
from this? So one of the,
major,
reasons for proton therapies for pediatrics
and teenage and young adult adults. So that's
from naught all the way up to 25,
26.
And that's because because protons put in less
damage into the surrounding healthy tissue, obviously, any
type of radiation can,
lead to secondary cancers later in life.
If you put less damage in, you there's
less chance of secondary malignancies.
And therefore,
if you're so for example, if you're treated
and you're 70, the
secondary cancers 30 years later on is less
of a concern to you. If you're 10,
secondary cancers when you're 40 is big concern.
So
a lot of the work is on, pediatric
and teenage and young adults, but also we're
treating really difficult to treat tumors that lie
close to critical organs.
So for example, those are the brain and
spine
because the way protons stop is they have
a sharp,
end.
So x rays go straight through the bodies.
Protons actually stop at the tumor.
And therefore, you can treat closer to critical
organs. Has Brexit changed this at all?
Yeah. Brexit's changed it quite a bit. So
one of the things is that across Europe,
I think something like 2,000,000,000 has been sent
spent on proton therapy. So most countries in
Europe have a proton therapy center or a
number of them. And,
one of the projects that I lead is,
a project to integrate research in proton therapy
centers across Europe.
And that's been really useful. We've all worked
together.
And my whole career, I've had European projects
where I've worked with colleagues across Europe. And
by pooling your resources
and by pooling your expertise,
you know, the sum is greater than the
constituent
parts. And it's been one of those things.
So something like proton therapy, it's not just
physicists,
it's physicists, it's engineers, it's clinicians, it's biologists,
it's health economists. So you need a big
multidisciplinary team of people, all different sorts of
all different sorts of aspects because it's, you
know, it's a multidisciplinary question. And if we're
going to make sure that we keep the
technology right at the cutting edge,
so, you know, we're delivering the best cures
for patients.
You need all of those edge. So, you
know, we're delivering the best cures for patients.
You need all of those streams of expertise
coming into it.
Also, if you're treating rarer cancers, you get
less, you know, no one country gets
that many cases. So you want to pull
the resources there. And it's it's just a
very good way of working together. But Brexit
makes that impossible? Or It doesn't make it
impossible. But for example, I,
I've led a number of projects in my
time, and I quite like leading projects.
Suppose if I'm going to be a little
bit arrogant, I think I'm quite good at
doing it.
And pulling those projects together and looking and
building networks of people, bringing that together
is something I've done before. We can't do
that.
Well, we can do it, but we can't
be the leaders of the project. So you
can put in all the work.
Mhmm.
And then you hand it over to someone
else. You know, you're always looking at projects
at the moment. You can be an associate
partner. There is a route in through,
Innovate UK.
We can you get some of the money
back from the government, but you, you then
have to wait to make sure that you're
on the right list.
You know, it's it's not the way it
was done before. And you're always
you're sort of you're a bit of an
also run. Like, I'm in a fortunate position
that people want to work with us, but
I do know of other people who have
said,
actually people are, you know, European partners are
basically saying, oh, it's too much bother to
work with the UK. It hasn't happened to
me, but I have heard of cases.
So it just makes instead of being able
to
effectively look at all of the funding calls
and, you know, equate Horizon Europe along with
everything else, and it may be the right
way of doing things.
We're now in a position where we're sort
of second class citizens.
And, you know, you're hoping someone will invite
you into your proposal, or you basically say,
look, I'll do all the work and then
I'll hand it over to someone else,
which,
you know, effectively means it's led from another
country, all the work isn't seen.
It's very altruistic, but you can imagine when
universities look at,
adding up the pennies and, you know, what
you've actually done, you'll be they'll say, well,
you didn't really lead it because it's down
to somebody else. So, you know, and what
do I advise other staff to do? Do
I advise my younger staff that,
you know, the way to do is to
lead a a European project? Probably not. They're
much better going for something else because their
career progression will also depend on things like
that. Kind of second class citizen thing, is
that really
as a result of the kind of the
bureaucracy that's been involved around
Brexit and and what's been happening politically, or
is it actually just where we are anyway?
I think pre
Brexit,
we were very much
part of Europe. You know, science has always
been and I've
to be honest, personally, I feel more European
than I feel British.
And I've apologized for my country more times
than I've ever done in the past
3 years.
It's a change. And
we're
I talk to people about European projects
and you and they basically said, well, are
you going to sign?
You know, is the UK government going to
sign? And the answer is, I don't know.
But you're getting to the point now of
saying, I think you ought to make the
assumption that they won't
because,
you know, we haven't heard anything. We were
promised they would.
And everything is
so unsure at the moment.
You know, it's probably better if you assume
that they we won't
rather than assuming that we will, if we
will, if we do, it would be fantastic.
But I think it's that uncertainty.
And
I am sure we are further down the
list.
We're being used a bit as if the
horizon Europe is being used a little bit
politically.
And it's unfortunate, but, you know,
you look at COVID and did all the
breakthroughs in COVID come from just British funded
science, or was this collaboration across Europe and
things like that? Nope.
I think people have forgotten that. I think
a lot of the breakthroughs that have come
forward in the past 40 years
are helped by being part of Europe. You
know, we've worked together with our European colleagues.
British science is very strong.
Before Brexit, the UK's arrangement was that when
they put money into Horizon, they actually ended
up getting more back. With Brexit wiping out
that positive position for the UK, I asked
professor Graham Reid what the pros and cons
are for the two routes facing the government
now. If you do it through the EU,
then
you're building
on
40 years
of collaborations
and partnerships.
So you've got a 40 year investment
in these partnerships, and and and doing it
through Europe means that you you take that
40 year history and you add another layer.
The other advantage of doing it through Europe
is that the EU
the I mean, the what what is horizon?
Horizon is a protocol,
which means that
if you want to set up a project,
lots of the deal is already done. You
don't start from scratch.
You actually lift a rule book off the
shelf
that has got lots of the deal done,
and then you customize it around the interest
of your individual project and individual partners.
So it's relatively
easy
to form an international
collaboration.
You've got lots of networks of people that
have been working together,
and,
so off you go. And I think that
that's, you know,
there are some very elegant
funding instruments within the horizon portfolio.
There are other funding instruments that don't work
terribly well for the UK.
And that takes us to the disadvantage because
the disadvantage
is that this is this is a an
arrangement that is a a compromise
between 27
EU member states.
And it's it's
designed
around the interests of the EU.
So if you look at a UK alternative,
then the advantage is that we can optimize
it around UK interests,
rather than have compromises
at every time.
We can make it global,
so it's it's, it's geographic emphasis and all
the sort of partnerships that we build
can be you you start with a map
of the world
rather than having a sort of EU plus
people from other places. The the the starting
point is is different.
And that optimizing around UK interests is a
big deal because we we really can make
this work for the UK.
However,
it's
it means starting from scratch.
We don't have anything.
So and starting from scratch with something of
this scale is not trivial. I mean, this
is a big thing to start from scratch.
So it's going to require
a period of transition
that will cost money.
You know, you cannot switch out of horizon
into a standalone
scheme
just with a click of fingers.
This is going to be an expensive and
time consuming thing,
and that is a significant disadvantage
balanced against the advantage of having something that
would be optimized around the the UK interest.
That idea of a global superpower
would surely include the European Union, And the
hope would be that collaborations between UK scientists
and EU scientists
would continue
in a productive way the way they have
until Brexit.
I asked professor Rachel Armstrong how now she's
based in the EU in Belgium,
she views
her UK colleagues.
I'm committed to using UK researchers, but it
puts you in a weak position
as a coordinator
because you're having to
shore up your consortium so that if the
UK government does something stupid
like
invokes article 16,
then you're still able to complete your project.
So that is that is a concern.
The other thing that,
you know, I've been in discussion with the,
let's say the
coordination
administration,
in the European partners and in my own
institution,
is the irritation
that is felt
from the games that are being played
that, you know, deadlines are being extended. So
for example with the ERC
application
there were
weeks weeks of delay before people were notified
of of of their results,
because of the,
politics that were that were, you know,
you know, a foot,
between the UK and the and and and
the EU.
Excuse my brief interruption.
But in June of this year, the European
Research Council, the ERC,
confirmed that a 143
UK based researchers
would lose their grumps from the ERC unless
they relocated
to a country
in the European Union.
This is very destabilizing
for university
relationships,
and it really makes,
you
not want to involve,
British partners because unlike, let's say, Norwegian partners
which have a stable, you know, so they
have an associated
relationship with the program, no problem with that.
You know that they're associated. You know that
they know their rules for engagement.
But with the UK,
there's still a huge amount of uncertainty and
quite frankly anything could happen. So if I
didn't come from the UK and if I
didn't have
established great relationships with my, British colleagues,
then I I I I'll be honest with
you. I would be reluctant
to think about British partners
even if they were the best in the
world. I'll be thinking
second or third best will be good enough
because I know that I can manage this
project. I know that I can get to
the end of it without
some great administrative
disaster.
The uncertainty of that relationship between the UK
and the EU in terms of Horizon Europe
and science research more widely is clearly
a source of great concern for the scientists.
And it will obviously affect their research. For
Karen Kirby's work and for many other scientists,
that research
is key for people's lives.
How will that impact patients today?
Probably not at all.
How will that impact patients in 5 years
time? You know, we may not have done
some of the clinical trials that we would
do otherwise.
We may not have done some of the
studies
of how things like proton interact with drug
combinations.
There will be discoveries that aren't made.
And, you know, ultimately,
if we stop now,
and no research is done,
then,
across the board, it's, it's,
there will be there will be things that
we would have discovered that we won't have
discovered.
And so it, you know, it's not it's
not tomorrow.
But for example, some of the work that
we're doing at the moment is on a
new modality
modality where we actually, the NHS Center for
Protons is brilliant, and we deliver the dose
at ultra high dose rates. That's in less
than,
less than a second.
What that appears to do, although we've still
got quite a lot of work to do
on it, is to put even less damage
into the healthy tissue
and still kill the tumor.
Now that means that you can start to
be it's a it's this sort of paradigm
change that you could move into
where
effectively
you could treat even more tumors because there
are still tumors that you can't treat with
protons, just because although you could put enough
dose into the tumor, it's what would happen
to the healthy tissue that tumor might recur.
But, an area like that, if it's not
funded, because we've got to understand it's not
safe to use with patients at the moment
because we don't know enough about it.
There
I should
yeah.
There have been some clinical trials where it's
been used palliatively
very, very carefully.
In terms of on in extremities, it was
used in,
arms and legs for painful bone metastases
to reduce the pain. But if you were
going to use it,
radically,
you want to know a bit more about
it. We need to do a bit more
research.
If there was none of the, at the
moment where we're getting some funding for that.
And, but if that funding stopped,
you can't do research without some money. You've
got no people, no infrastructure.
Running a research room costs money,
especially at the moment, cost of electricity running
the cycle transfer on cheap.
So
it's things like that. So it's
all the infrastructure, and it goes across the
board.
There is so much research
going on.
And it's it's not just the money, it's
the contacts. You know, if we don't have
our colleagues in Europe,
we don't link in with them, we're then
we haven't got those synergies that come from
working with people who've got similar equipment to
us.
But,
you know, we
by working together, you effectively reduce the cost
to get more benefits.
In an ideal world, what would happen now?
Oh, the government would sign the agreement.
Like, ideal world, if I can have whatever
I want, the government we'd we'd reverse that
result on Brexit. But I I suppose that's
naive, and that that's not going to happen.
But in an ideal world,
what could help is the government sign in
the agreement so that the UK enters Horizon
Europe in the same way as any other
European partner.
It means, you know, that would and that's
that's what we believed would happen.
That's what we were told.
So, you know, that would be
that would help. The uncertainty
about how this relationship might work post Brexit,
the uncertainty
about what the UK's
new funding model looks like is, as I
say, at the root of quite a lot
of this concern
amongst the UK science research community.
I put that to professor Graham Reid.
I absolutely
recognize the apprehension
because what you're comparing
is a well understood and familiar European program
with an unknown
UK alternative.
So if you're if you're comparing the familiar
with the unknown, in that case, you know,
the natural human reaction is to be apprehensive
and and and be and skeptical.
So that doesn't surprise me at all, I
think that that's an entirely
rational,
response.
I think I would take issue
with claims that the government doesn't do what
it says it will do
in science.
The
the government
first of all, we have a we've got
a pretty high level of transparency
in the way that the finances
are
announced at top level.
So the size of the science budget
and its,
the way in which the the the pace
at which the money is going to be
released,
and its distribution
among funding agencies
is all in the public domain.
It's all scrutinized
by parliament.
It's all scrutinized
by the media.
And, actually, you know, some people complain that
there's too much documentation
and scrutiny.
So I'd say that,
that
the the the the track record
of spending the money that is announced
is actually pretty good.
I mean, the you know, there there's, you
know, there's a bit of fast footwork on
sort of reannouncing things three times and all
that sort of thing. But, actually, if you
look at the formal documents rather than the
spin, I think the track record's pretty good.
What worries me
and worries me quite a lot
is that
if we
continue
to sit in this,
halfway house where we're not associating with Horizon
Europe and we're not going ahead with plan
b,
then we have 1,000,000,000 of pounds
that has been allocated
to science, but is not being spent on
science.
And
no reasonable
finance ministry
will allow huge amounts of public money to
just sit there being unused.
And I do worry
that there will come a point,
possibly as soon as next March at the
end of the financial year, when the treasury
will say, well hang on a minute, we
we gave you 1,000,000,000 of pounds in 2021,
You're still faffing about deciding whether you want
to be in Europe or not. We're just
gonna have the money back and we'll spend
it on something to do with the cost
of living crisis.
In researching this podcast, I read about and
heard from scientists
from EU countries who'd come to the UK
before Brexit,
many years before it was even considered a
possibility,
who had felt compelled to leave
as a result
of that referendum.
It's certainly true that the opinion of the
scientists and the academic community
is not the only argument
in this story,
but it seems a shame
to say the least
that a nearly
if not entirely
unanimous
voice calling for associate status
in horizon
could be ignored
for the sake of political wranglings
over trade agreements
and the like. I imagine that's why it's
such a key bargaining tip though.
I'm glad I'm not a politician
and I'm really glad that I'm not a
politician
who's got themselves into this particular situation.
It is my hope along with the vast
majority
of the academic community
that the political
arguments and discussions
will end
with the UK having associate membership
of the Horizon
Europe Fund.
Thank you very much to professors Karen Kirby,
Rachel Armstrong, and Graham Reed for talking to
me for this episode of the Physics World
Stories podcast, and we'll be back next month
when I'm hoping we'll have a bit more
fun exploring
something to do with physics
and sport.
And thank you very much for listening.
Physics world.