Brexit threatens to upend centuries of great innovation
FOR MANY years Andre Geim was best known for designing an experiment that looked more like a parlour trick than a serious piece of scientific research.
One Friday evening, in a moment of boredom at his Dutch lab, the Soviet-born physicist casually poured a glass of water onto a super- electromagnet. When the water struck the magnet it didn’t spill to the floor, as Geim had expected, but instead began to float as a cluster of pristine liquid balls.
Geim , with characteristic wit and flourish, published his findings in the April 1997 issue of Physics World alongside a picture he took of a live frog sitting pensively on the levitating droplets.
Shortly after Geim arrived at Manchester University in 2001, he began hosting Friday night sessions for students to conduct what he calls “curiositydriven research”- a similar way to demonstrate the value of impromptu experimentation. In 2002, following one of these gatherings, Geim’s attention was drawn to a ball of used Scotch tape in a wastepaper bin. On it was a grey residue, from where it had been stuck to a piece of graphite.
Geim, who specialises in minutely thin materials, placed the tape under an atomic microscope and found the layers of residual carbon were thinner than any he’d seen before. Immediately he suspected he had found graphene, a one atomthin material (a strand of hair is between 100,000 and 300,000 atoms thick) that had, until this moment, been only a white whale of speculation among theoretical physicists.
In the subsequent weeks Geim worked 14-hour days with one of his Ph.D. students, Konstantin Novoselov, to discover graphene’s extra- ordinary properties. The material, it turned out, was 200 times stronger than steel; electrons would whisk across its honeycomb-like structure 1,000 times quicker than in copper. The commercial value of the material soon became clear.
A clutch of patents illustrate its potential uses: Mobile phones with folding screens, ultra-longlife batteries, aircraft wings and high- speed trains. In 2015, to quicken the arrival of these products, Manchester University launched the National Graphene Institute, a project supported by £ 1 million a year ( RM6 million) in funding from the EU’s Graphene Flagship, Europe’s largest ever joint research project.
All of this potential came into doubt on June 23, 2016, when 51.8 per cent of the British electorate voted to leave the European Union. Geim describes himself as a Euro-skeptic. Yet he watched the results of Brexit trickle in with a sense of gathering dismay (“At about 4am it became clear that the Remainers were likely to lose,” he told me.
“I went to bed acknowledging the human species were not very smart animals.”). Geim’s response was typical of that of many scientists, for whom freedom of movement and cross-border partnerships are indispensable. A Brexit survey run in March by Nature found that of the 907 UK researchers who were polled, around 83 per cent believed the UK should remain in the EU. Paul Drayson, former minister of science in the Department for Business, told Scientific American: “The very idea that a country would voluntarily withdraw from Europe seems anathema to scientists.” In Geim’s case, he and most of his engineers are not British by birth. Indian and Chinese nationalities dominate, followed by Russians, Ukrainians, Italians, Spanish and Polish. All of his funding comes from the EU. The Brexit result has cast thick doubt about how money and people will flow to and from the UK
Geim washes an old mug in a grimy kitchen in the corridor along from his office at Manchester University. While the 12 months following the Brexit vote have been characterised by confusion about where the UK will stand in its future of dogged isolation, Geim seems clear on what will happen next. “Nothing positive can be expected,” he says. “We cannot even expect a neutral outcome anymore . The question now is simply: To what extent is this going to be a disaster for science in the UK.”
Geim’s bracing straightforwardness is born of experience. He came to the UK in the late 1980s with just £ 1 in his pocket. Having served Soviet Russia, Geim knows only too well the risks of blinkered national hubris and isolationism.
In practical terms too, he has already seen the effects. Every year Geim receives a steady flow of applications from abroad seeking to join the Marie Curie research programme in Manchester.
In 2017 he has received no applications at all.
The danger Brexit poses is vast to British scientific research - that long and storied tradition which, from Newton to Hunter, from Turing to Crick, has enabled the UK to put its name to a multitude of world- altering discoveries. Sticklers will argue that Newton’s discovery of gravity, or Turing’s foundational work in computing happened without EU subsidy. But none could seriously contest that British scientists have flourished within the framework the EU has created for collaborative science, and the structures it has provided to facilitate that enterprise.
Even before Brexit, the level of UK science spending stood below 0.5 per cent of GDP, a lower percentage than any other G8 nation. Loss of additional funding would compound the pressures placed on scientific institutions. Even if the British government manages to compensate for the financial shortfall, the psychological effects of Brexit will linger. In 2015, long before the Brexit vote, Dr Sara Kendrew, an astronomer at Oxford University, warned of anti-immigrant rhetoric’s ambient effects. “Our foreignborn scientists are part of the hidden face of migration in this country,” she wrote . “They work extremely hard to teach and mentor students at our universities . . . and bring in millions of pounds in research funds.”
The cri de coeur of Brexit reflects the body politic’s diminishing interest in, bordering on outright dismissal of, facts and expertise.
As Michael Gove, then UK Justice secretary and leading Brexiteer, notoriously put it last year:
The people have “had enough of experts.” It’s a position reflected elsewhere in the world.
The election of a TV celebrity and real estate mogul to the office of the US presidency has ushered in what many perceive to be a systemic assault on the sciences in the Anglo- Saxon world.
There was, for example, Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt to lead the US Environmental Protection Agency, a man who had previously stated his belief that there was no need for an E.P. A. There was the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate change as a reality - scouring all mentions of the term from the White House’s website on inauguration day.
On Apr 22, a day to celebrate Planet Earth each year, more than a million people gathered in some 600 cities to stage a March for Science.
In Washington, where 100,000 gathered, a sea of bobbing placards displayed slogans ranging from the droll (“Science is Real. Your Alternative Facts are -1”) to the rallying (“Science Belongs To Everyone”).
Among the event organiser’s 21 stated aims was the desire to affirm science as a “vital feature of a working democracy,” and a call for evidence-based policy. — WP-Bloomberg