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Chemical Technology • July 2016
M
id-way through 2015, I applied for grant funding
for my new start-up, Pikhaya.com. The Open Data
Incubator has €7,8 mil from the EU’s Horizon
2020 fund to provide €100 000s to viable startups. My UK-
registered company applied and was accepted into the first
tranche of grantees to kickstart my new business. Without
that funding, it would probably not have gotten off the ground.
A year from now, we will no longer qualify for that funding.
The UK will be out of the EU.
On 24 June, across the UK, highly-skilled professionals
woke up to discover that the majority of people had voted
in a referendum for the UK to leave the EU. All the leading
universities, research institutes, business organisations,
unions, political parties and civil society groups had cam-
paigned to remain in the EU. It had little effect.
‘Project Fear’, as the Remain campaign came to be
called, was seen as overhyped and unbelievable. The reality
is that it was too restrained.
According to Unesco’s ‘Science Report’, the EU has
22,2 % of the world’s scientific researchers, compared to
19,1 % in China and 16,7 % in the US. Better yet, the free
movement of researchers and their families has permitted
polyglot teams to emerge, and the collaboration between
governments to create a single source for funding.
The sheer scale of research investment possible when a
population of 500 million collaborates has resulted in the
multinational super-collider at CERN, as well as production
of the super-expensive equipment necessary to research
nano-materials or rare particles.
Researchers at the University of Manchester first identi-
fied graphene in 2004, when physicists Andre Geim and
Kostya Novoselov first described their successful isolation
of the atom-thin carbon material. Both are immigrants.
Geim is a Soviet-born Dutch-British physicist. Novoselov is,
similarly, Soviet-born.
Their research led directly to the UK government invest-
ing over €50 million into the development of the National
Graphene Institute (NGI), supported with an additional
€35million from the European Regional Development Fund.
Overall, 62 % of all funding put into nanotech research
has come from the EU, along with 67 % into evolutionary
biology. Over the last decade, the UK has received some
€12 billion in research grants from the EU. The UK is the
second largest beneficiary of European Commission and
#Brexit and the impact
on research and technology
for the world
by Gavin Chait
The difference between last year and
next year can be life-changing.
NANOTECHNOLOGY