‘The best science is international’: UK, EU restore research partnership

Tevva, a British zero-emissions truck manufacturer, isn’t just trying to create a replacement for diesel transports. It’s also serving as a stage for European research.

At least in a manner of speaking. As part of a project organized by Horizon Europe, the European Union’s behemoth scientific research and innovation program, Tevva is working with scientists and companies hailing from both the United Kingdom and the EU to develop the next-generation electric truck.

“And they’ve set some really aggressive objectives, with difficult range and efficiency targets,” says Stuart Cottrell, Tevva’s head of energy services and government partnerships.

Having access to the capabilities of partners from countries such as the Netherlands, Spain, and Greece has helped Tevva see what’s possible in pushing for greater efficiency – hauling more cargo, for greater distances, for less energy. With their zero-emissions trucks as laboratories, Tevva is helping manufacturers demonstrate their capabilities.

“It’s kind of a two-way street. We’re developing a product, while some of them are developing tools,” says Mr. Cottrell. What’s clear is that together they’re pushing the envelope. “This depth of consortium couldn’t have been built solely in the U.K.,” he says.

As Britain left the European Union, it strained the bridge between British scientists and their EU counterparts, and severed British access to Horizon Europe, the EU’s behemoth innovation-funding arm and its €95.5 billion ($104.5 billion) coffer. This month, after years of negotiations, the United Kingdom is back as an “associate country” to Horizon Europe, and the world will be better for it, scientists say.

Today’s most pressing issues require the best-trained scientific minds, and those talents are rarely contained within a single country’s borders, says Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, the U.K.’s independent science academy.

“If you just take the simple problems, pandemics, climate change, net zero – all of these require major international collaboration. Not just in terms of ideas, but it fundamentally depends on people,” says Dr. Smith. “The whole point of Brexit was Britain going it alone and doing its own stuff, but top-level science is one area where international cooperation is absolutely essential, and you can’t go it alone and be a major scientific power.”

Brexit brain drain

For years, the U.K. was the No. 2 destination for scientists pursuing research, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development figures. But “that’s really been damaged by Brexit and the perception of us being cut off from the world,” says Bob Ward, policy director at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. “Not just in terms of funding and barriers to visas, but the idea that somehow the U.K. is hostile to working with others.”

With Brexit, the U.K. dropped behind both China and the United States. “That’s really anathema to the research spirit. Politicians need to realize that’s not helping the U.K,” says Dr. Ward.

The stats are clear: The U.K. needs Horizon Europe, which has been part of the U.K. scientific framework for decades. Collaboration yields results. More than a third of top U.K. research papers are co-authored with European partners. Conversely, EU programs are cited three times more often compared with member states alone.

“It’s a club, a gang you need to be in if you’re the U.K. We’re not America; we’re not China,” says Dr. Smith, of the Royal Society, about Horizon Europe. “The prestige of being associated with things like the European Research Council Fellowships, being assessed by a huge pool of experts, 30,000 researchers in 30 countries ... as opposed to the alternative which is going it alone ... is pretty unthinkable.”

After Brexit, the U.K. government underwrote projects “unless and until” it was able to again associate with Horizon Europe, Dr. Smith says. Still, that didn’t prevent an exodus of scientists to the EU and to the U.S. Look at those who received Europe Research Council grants, which require EU residency, he says.

“These are the brightest and the best [scientists], these are hugely prestigious awards, and about 1 in 6 [pulled up stakes] from the U.K. and moved to the EU,” says Dr. Smith. “That was very damaging in terms of the loss of clout of people, but also just the general mood music in and around collaboration. Then a lot of researchers in the U.K. found it quite difficult to recruit European Union postdoc researchers.”

The EU also needs U.K. brainpower and institutions. Bringing them back into the EU fold is a “real milestone, a clear win-win for both sides and for global scientific progress,” said EU Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Iliana Ivanova in a statement. “Together, we can push further and faster.”

“The best science is international science”

Perhaps the clearest example of how science demands international cooperation is in astronomy and its related fields.

Astrophysicist David Armstrong is running a Horizon Europe project – which the U.K. stepped in on an emergency basis to fund post-Brexit – to find Neptune-sized planets in extremely close orbit around other stars. That requires a $1.5 billion telescope facility, the clear sky of a Southern Hemispheric location, and scientific brains scattered across continents.

“The entire thing is basically international,” says Dr. Armstrong, a professor at the University of Warwick. “It has to be that way.”

They use a massive telescope observatory that sits in a desert in Chile, and tap star-parameter expertise in Portugal, spectrograph scientists in Switzerland, and other teams in Argentina, the U.S., and Australia.

How did the field evolve to become so globally intertwined? For one, telescopes are expensive, and no country would want to take on that vast budget alone, Dr. Armstrong explains.

“Then you say if we’re going to build this incredible facility, we need to put it in the best possible location, and the best possible location is usually in some other country. Then you get to the sense of, ‘Well, if we’re going to do all of this, you want the best possible science with it.’ If you want different skills, you quite often find the best person for that might be somewhere else.”

“The best science is international science,” says Dr. Ward, the London School of Economics policy director.

“Back in collaboration territory”

Zero-emissions vehicles, tidal energy, and DNA sequencing technology have all been helped along by Horizon Europe projects. Scientists are also looking to restore ocean health and develop climate-neutral cities.

“If you look across all the impacts of science and its applications, some of the major stuff where it required really big investment and big levels of cooperation – many of those grew out of originally EU projects,” says Dr. Smith.

Collaboration also funds science that otherwise might not be tackled, or tackled so soon.

Without it, the world might have had to wait a bit longer for a hydrogen-electric truck, says Mr. Cottrell, Tevva’s partnerships director. Large companies like Volvo may have flocks of in-house researchers, but amid legacy products, shareholders, and profit margins, may not prioritize such ambitious technology.

“Their appetite and their pacing is quite different,” says Mr. Cottrell. “We’re not burdened by any of that stuff, but at the same time, we don’t have the scale to go and make all this happen by ourselves.”

And now that the U.K. is back in with Horizon Europe, some hope that other corridors to the EU blocked by Brexit might reopen.

“I keep hearing signals that people want to begin talking about other collaborations,” says Dr. Smith of the Royal Society. “Instead of being a bitter standoff, we’re back in collaboration territory.”