The UK leaving EU research programmes will be ‘catastrophic’ for COVID-19 and other research, according to correspondence published in Nature.
In the letter, geneticist Paul Nurse, astronomer Martin Rees, former prime minister Gordon Brown and colleagues (including members of the lobby group Scientists for Labour) say: “The COVID-19 crisis has brought into sharp focus the importance of UK involvement in these programmes and the need for international collaborators to have access to UK facilities.”
They warn that: “anything less than continued UK association with these programmes will be catastrophic for both UK and European research.”
Of the first 40 EU-funded COVID-19 research projects (totalling £50 million), UK scientists have been partners in projects worth £18 million, in collaborations spanning more than a dozen countries.
During the two most recently completed iterations of the Horizon project, since 2000, the EU has been the third-largest funder of British research into infectious diseases. This year, the European Commission has committed £14 billion to pandemic-recovery funding in the Horizon Europe research budget and the EU4Health programme.
As economies around the world spiral into recession, the prospect of filling multimillion-pound holes in UK research and development budgets is politically and financially daunting. With the end of the Brexit transition period just over three months away, it is impossible to develop separate UK equivalents to European Union and European Commission science and knowledge-exchange programmes, the authors say.
“As we weather the worst public-health crisis in living memory, now is the time for the United Kingdom to be leading and enhancing scientific collaborations with our European partners, not leaving them,” they say.
