Do I have to convince people of the practical importance of science? This past May I watched a dear friend of mine saved from leukemia by “modern medicine.” Then a few weeks later I was sitting at the Michael Edidin Celebration at the Johns Hopkins and marveling at how over the last three decades our understanding of immunology has led to real advances in in cancer treatment, the very one’s that saved my friend’s life.
So I am alarmed by the British vote to exit the European Union. Britain is a leader in world science. The UK is a relatively small country with only about one percent of the world’s population. But, according to the Atlantic, it is home to 3.3% of the world’s scientists, 7% of the worlds scientific output, and (as scientists like to measure success) 15% of the most most cited papers come out of British laboratories. That’s amazing, but for those of us who walk in scientific circles not in the least surprising!
But, but, but … and again according to the Atlantic, a very sizable portion of funding for scientific research in the United Kingdom comes from EU grants. Between 2007 and 2013, the U.K. received €8.8 billion (~$10 billion) for scientific research. Over the last three decades there has been an ascendancy of European Science. Advances in particle physics no longer bear the dateline of National Argonne Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois, but dateline CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. This, of course, culminated in the March 14, 2013 discovery of the long-sought after Higgs Boson. Similarly, we laud the accomplishments of the European Space Agency, most notably the August 6, 2014 successful landing of the Rosetta Probe on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. on 6 August 2014. I got up early in the morning to watch both of these events – just like I did in the sixties to watch America’s space launches. “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” These projects are important and are stunning examples of international scientific cooperation.
Where do we go from here? Last week’s vote casts a pall of doubt and throws a huge number of scientist’s lives and livelihoods into a turmoil of uncertainty. What of these great cooperative scientific ventures? What of scientific funding in the United Kingdom? What about the jobs of English scientists living in Europe and of European Scientists living in the UK?
This is all part of the “collateral damage” caused by last Thursday’s vote in the United Kingdom. As Prime Minister David Cameron said last Friday in his resignation speech, “… the British people have made a very clear decision to take a different path,” and as a result the process is set in motion. It has to be that way because such is the meaning of democracy. The likely victims are all of us. We must all pay the piper.