How British science can flourish after Brexit

I’m a Texan as well as a physicist so I hope it doesn’t sound boosterish if I say that no nation has contributed more to basic science than Britain. No other country has such an uncanny aptitude for it. I’m not sure what combination of poetry and pragmatism makes this possible, but I don’t need to go far to find evidence. A few streets from where I work in Mayfair lies the Royal Institution, which earned more Nobel prizes in science than all of Russia.

Or consider Newton, Darwin, Faraday, Maxwell, Rutherford, Hardy, Dirac, Fleming, Crick, Higgs, Hawking and Wiles. All are bywords for British originality. They have something else in common: none was concerned about the utility of their work.

I’m talking about basic science, also known as curiosity-driven research: the kind done without consideration of how useful it might be. Time and again, research of this kind leads to the most far-reaching breakthroughs. In his memoir A Mathematician’s Apology, G.H. Hardy singled out his own expertise of number theory as one of particular uselessness. Yet the following year, it helped break the German Enigma codes. When Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, they were unaware of the potential for DNA profiling or genetic modification. But that didn’t stop them raising a glass in a Cambridge pub and declaring that they had ‘found the secret of life’.

One institution that has turned a blind eye to the benefits of basic science is the European Union. Horizon 2020, the EU’s research funding agency, mainly supports outcome-led investigations tied to political aims. To decide which projects to fund, applicants are required to predict the impact of their research. This is putting the cart before the horse. They are seeking the applications of patterns that have yet to be spotted.