For the UK science community, participating in the research and innovation framework program of the European Union (EU) “may hang on how much fish France gets out of the English Channel,” quips Vladimir Fal’ko, a condensed-matter theorist at the University of Manchester. “In Europe, things become political very quickly.”
Political impasses have landed both the UK and Switzerland on the sidelines of Horizon Europe, the current €95.5 billion ($102 billion) framework program, which runs from 2021 through 2027. Negotiations between the UK and the European Commission (EC), the EU’s executive body, have stalled over the Northern Ireland Protocol, which aims to satisfy the need for an open border for divided Ireland while also enforcing that border as a separation between the EU, to which the Republic of Ireland belongs, and the UK, of which Northern Ireland is a part. (See “Northern Ireland physicists face a unique post-Brexit situation”...
