Brexit fuels brain drain as skilled Britons head to the EU
Another n=1 anecdote here: I am a relatively junior academic in one of the UK&#x27;s formerly-excellent universities, and I will be moving my lab and leaving the country ahead of Brexit in 2021, starting a new professorship on the last day of December.<p>This is for many different reasons – but the loss of EU citizenship brings with it loss to EURATOM, significantly affecting the availability of medical isotopes; the loss of access to Erasmus exchange-student funding; the loss of access to the ERC; and the loss of regulatory oversight of the European medicines agency, the EMA. All of these things could be retained with political will, but no will is forthcoming.<p>Why does this matter? Well, I am a medical physicist &#x2F; engineer, and I make things for quantifying biology. The US FDA requirements and the EU EMA requirements define what is feasible. They are often at odds. The EMA is, as a rule, stricter, and in my experience in trying to conduct multinational clinical trials, the EU regulations are the &quot;it must be <i>sterile</i>&quot; counterpart to the FDA &quot;it must be <i>clean</i>&quot;. Our QPs have large arguments with US FDA pharmacists about no evidence of harm vs no evidence of safety (the &quot;precautionary principle&quot;). Without getting into specifics, when it comes to dealing with cancer patients, who have compromised immunity and often die of infection, I think it is only acceptable to be utterly paranoid.<p>Some US sites that I will not name explicitly think that &quot;we&quot;, the European sites, are paranoid. They think that by having regulations that require an estimated probability of infection as being ≤1e-6 or ≤1e-9 in a clinical trial with ~1k people in it is &quot;overkill&quot;, and their &quot;reasonable approach&quot; that is far cheaper, quicker, and easier, is appropriate. I think, and our QPs think, that their approach is quantitatively worse -- but it is very hard to estimate these probabilities; perhaps using a laminar flow hood as opposed to a cleanroom &amp; isolator reduces that probability from 1e-6 to 1e-5 -- but it could well be 1e-3 and we don&#x27;t know. Yet.<p>At any rate, the only reason that &quot;we are listened to&quot; as a bloc against the huge, multinational factors at play, is because of EMA rules, as implemented in the UK by the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority, the MHRA, which publishes a many-thousand-page guide to EU EMA rules. Although frustrated by them, I am very glad that these rules exist. They protect patients, and my backside. They are written in blood, from Thalidomide to deaths that have arisen as a result of industrial autoclaves in Britain owned by the pharmaceutical industry being loaded unevenly, leading to &quot;sterile&quot; saline not being sterile. Post-Brexit, I am sure that they are exactly an example of &quot;Brussels red tape&quot; that is to be &quot;streamlined&quot;. Similar examples exist in food standards, consumer electronics, and many other areas. Freedom and deregulation come with a very real cost. Can you drink the water in Flint, Michigan yet?<p>The removal of other agencies hamper my ability to recruit students, get grant funding, actually buy isotopes to order -- particularly important as a lot of them come from nuclear reactors on the continent that we do not have equivalents for -- and otherwise function as an academic.<p>The UK&#x27;s spending on scientific research is, as a function of GDP, far lower than other equivalent nations, particularly Germany and the US. Much of it comes from the charitable sector. In the post-covid world, this has taken a <i>huge</i> hit. Cancer Research UK is down £300m, for example [1], leading to, say, The University of Oxford cutting 40% of its oncology research staff [2] including professors and PIs who have faced the double-whammy of falling ERC funding and CRUK funding. Before you ask, UK governmental funding rules prohibit applications for specific diseases if an equivalent charitable organisation exists, meaning, for example, that you cannot easily apply to the MRC (the Medical Research Council) if it is work that would be fundable by CRUK. Similar stories exist for other charitable funders -- e.g. the British Heart Foundation plans to fire 300 staff following a 50% drop in income [3]. Other universities have started consultations on staff pay-cuts as well as redundancies, following a terrible fall in income both from grants and student fees. I was previously shortlisted for a professorship at another UK university; literally days after the lockdown started, hiring at essentially every university stopped.<p>Now is not a good time to be a UK academic. Universities elsewhere in the world, however, have weathered the coronavirus storm far better, and benefitted from national leadership that has explicitly protected them.<p>The TV ads have started telling us to &quot;Get ready for Brexit&quot;. I have to turn the TV off every time they come on. I cannot think of a worse time in history for the nation to do something so monumentally stupid to itself.<p>It is for these reasons that I am moving my research group and escaping pre-Brexit, forgoing seeing my mother at Christmas. Other nations are more civilised. I will be paid more, and, crucially, valued more. Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson may think that I am a moaning leftie-liberal to whom they can say &quot;good riddance&quot;. I would like to think that I am trying to build a better future for humanity as a whole in an imperfect world, and hold no romantic ideas of national pride to get in the way. Brexit is about racism and a deluded notion of history for an imperial past. I want no part of it.<p>----
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fundraising.co.uk&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;16&#x2F;cancer-research-uk-anticipates-300m-drop-in-income-over-three-years&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fundraising.co.uk&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;16&#x2F;cancer-research-uk-anti...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oxfordmail.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;18612973.oxford-university-cut-81-cancer-research-jobs-christmas&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oxfordmail.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;18612973.oxford-university...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bhf.org.uk&#x2F;what-we-do&#x2F;news-from-the-bhf&#x2F;news-archive&#x2F;2020&#x2F;july&#x2F;bhf-announces-consultation-and-warns-of-job-losses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bhf.org.uk&#x2F;what-we-do&#x2F;news-from-the-bhf&#x2F;news-arc...</a>