Scientists say no deal would be ‘seriously damaging’

WORLD-LEADING SCIENTISTS have warned Theresa May not to allow Brexit to create new barriers to collaboration across Europe.

Dozens of winners of the Nobel Prize have written to the Prime Minister and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker setting out their concerns.

Their message was echoed by the London-based Francis Crick Institute, which warned that a hard Brexit could cripple science across the continent.

Nobel winner and Crick director Sir Paul Nurse, one of the signatories to the letter, said scientists feared a hard Brexit would “seriously damage research”.

The letter to the Prime Minister, signed by 29 Nobel winners and six recipients of the Fields Medal awarded to outstanding mathematicians, said that “creating new barriers” to collaboration across the EU would “inhibit progress, to the detriment of us all”.

“Many of us in the science community therefore regret the UK’s decision to leave the European Union because it risks such barriers,” the group said.

They urged both sides in the Brexit negotiations to ensure “as little harm as possible is done to research”.

The letter’s signatories include biologist Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society.

Meanwhile, a survey of more than 1,000 staff at the Crick found 97 per cent of them believed a hard Brexit would be bad for UK science and 82 per cent thought it would have a detrimental effect on European science.