Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Brexit delay welcomed by leading UK chemists

#1
C C Offline
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/brex...99.article

EXCERPT: . . . Researchers across the UK have breathed a collective sigh of relief following the government’s decision to avoid crashing out of the EU on April 12. The EU agreed a Brexit delay of six months, with a date now set for October 31. The UK can exit earlier if Parliament ratifies the withdrawal agreement, but for many in the scientific community the delay rekindles hopes for Brexit to be doused.

‘Any form of Brexit would be catastrophic for UK science,’ says Fraser Stoddart, 2016 chemistry Nobel prize winner who is now based at Northwestern University in the US. ‘Most of the research community in the UK want to see the back of Brexit.’ Stoddart is more optimistic about the situation given the extension. [...] says Mike Galsworthy, who co-founded the campaign group Scientists for EU in 2015. ‘Crashing out would have been a terrible option for UK science,’ he states, adding that the country would have immediately slumped to ‘third country’ status with the EU and been ineligible for 45% of the funding from Horizon 2020, cut off from European Research Council (ERC) and small and medium enterprise (SME) funding lines.

Chemist Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow describes his reaction as one of relief, though he always felt Brexit was undeliverable. ‘The extension has brought uncertainty, which is causing damage, but much less than Brexit itself would,’ he adds. He is hopeful now that either Article 50 will be revoked, pulling the plug on Brexit, or a second referendum will take place. [...]

The postponement comes as anecdotal reports suggest Brexit worries are hurting UK science. ‘I know of people seeking promotions elsewhere. Also, we are not managing to attract postdocs and PhD students at the same levels as before,’ says Simon Coles, director of the UK National Crystallography Service at the University of Southampton. ‘We are already losing people.’ [...] He sees Brexit, and continued uncertainty, as inflicting an unseen human toll on young researchers...

The end to free movement and what this might means for EU researchers is still high on everyone’s list of concerns. Stoddart says the free passage of researchers into the UK from the EU had boosted the diversity and the quality of UK science. He estimates 65% of his UK-based research group in the late 1980s was non-British and says it flourished with often over a dozen different nationalities. Immigration should be unrestricted for people with scientific qualifications, says Hagan Bayley, chemical biologist at the University of Oxford... (MORE)
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Article Doubt cast on leading theory of the nucleus + Invariant subspace problem solved? C C 0 72 Jun 13, 2023 03:22 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article ‘Almost magical’: chemists can now move single atoms in and out of a molecule’s core C C 0 60 Jun 1, 2023 11:12 PM
Last Post: C C
  Dark matter regions challenge dogma + Chemists & musicians use sound for research C C 0 86 Feb 18, 2022 06:40 PM
Last Post: C C
  Chemists settle battery debate + Topology 101 + Chemists & recycling plastic waste C C 0 126 Jan 27, 2021 10:13 PM
Last Post: C C
  Chemists make brightest-ever materials + Higgs + ST wave packets + quantum tunneling C C 1 253 Aug 7, 2020 11:29 PM
Last Post: Syne
  Chemists weigh in on machine learning + End of theoretical physics as we know it C C 0 649 Aug 29, 2018 07:25 AM
Last Post: C C
  AI could make manufacturing new meds easier for chemists + Just what is a "quantum"? C C 0 446 Feb 20, 2018 08:28 PM
Last Post: C C
  Rewritable paper (chemists) + Very Low Frequency Radio Waves Protect Earth? C C 0 579 Jan 9, 2018 10:59 PM
Last Post: C C
  Chemists argue end of RNA hypothesis + Cosmic shape (maths) + Euro quantum future C C 0 459 Dec 20, 2017 07:41 PM
Last Post: C C
  QM entanglement is inevitable + Algorithm beats chemists at their own game C C 0 453 Aug 27, 2017 05:24 AM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)