Research without borders: why international cooperation is good for STEM

I've just finished reading Bryan Sykes' (okay, I know he's a bit controversial) The Seven Daughters of Eve, about the development of mitochondrial DNA research for population genetics. One chapter mentioned Dr Sykes' discovery of the parallel work of Hans-Jürgen Bandelt, who's Mathematics Genealogy Project provided a structure diagram perfectly suited to explaining Sykes' own evolutionary branching results. This discovery occurred largely by chance, suggesting that small research groups must rely either on serendipity or have knowledge of the latest professional papers in order to find other teams who's work might be useful.

This implies that the more international the character of scientific and technological research, the more likely there will be such fortuitous occurrences. Britain's tortuous path out of the European Union has led various organisations on both sides of the Channel to claim that this can only damage British STEM research. The Francis Crick Institute, a London-based biomedical research centre that opened last year, has staff originating from over seventy nations. This size and type of establishment cannot possibly rely on being supplied with researchers from just one nation. Yet EU scientists resident in Britain have felt 'less welcome' since the Brexit referendum, implying a potential loss of expertise in the event of a mass withdrawal.

In recent years, European Union research donations to the UK have exceeded Britain's own contributions by £3 billion, meaning that the additional £300 million newly announced for research and development over the coming four years is only ten percent of what the EU has provided - and the UK Government is clearly looking to the private sector to make up the shortfall. It should also be recognised that although there are high numbers of non-British nationals working in Britain's STEM sector, the country also has a fair number of its own STEM professionals working overseas in EU nations.

The United Kingdom is home to highly expensive, long-term projects that require overseas funding and expertise, including the Oxfordshire-based Joint European Torus nuclear fusion facility. British funding and staff also contribute to numerous big-budget international projects, from the EU-driven Copernicus Earth observation satellite programme to the non-EU CERN. The latter is best-known for the Large Hadron Collider, the occasional research home of physicist and media star Brian Cox (how does he find the time?) and involves twenty-two key nations plus researchers from more than eighty other countries. Despite the intention to stay involved in at least the non-EU projects, surveys suggest that post-Brexit there will be greater numbers of British STEM professionals moving abroad. Indeed, in the past year some American institutions have actively pursued the notion of recruiting more British scientists and engineers.

Of course, the UK is far from unique in being involved in so many projects requiring international cooperation. Thirty nations are collaborating on the US-based Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE); the recently-successful Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) involves staff from eighteen countries; and the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project utilises researchers of more than twenty nationalities. Although the USA has a large population when compared to European nations, one report from 2004 states that approaching half of US physicists were born overseas. Clearly, these projects are deeply indebted to non-nationals.

It isn't just STEM professionals that rely on journeying cross-border, either. Foreign science and technology students make up considerable percentages in some developed countries: in recent years, over 25% of the USA's STEM graduate students and even higher numbers of its master's degree and doctorate students were not born there. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several European countries have similar statistics, with Indian and Chinese students making up a large proportion of those studying abroad.

As a small nation with severely limited resources for research, New Zealand does extremely well out of the financial contributions from foreign students. Each PhD student spends an average of NZ$175,000 on fees and living costs, never mind additional revenue from the likes of family holidays, so clearly the economics alone make sense. Non-nationals can also introduce new perspectives and different approaches, potentially lessening inflexibility due to cultural mind sets. In recent years, two New Zealand-based scientists, microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles and nanotechnologist Dr Michelle Dickinson (A.K.A. Nanogirl) have risen to prominence thanks to their fantastic science communication work, including with children. Both were born in the UK, but New Zealand sci-comm would be substantially poorer without their efforts. Could it be that their sense of perspective homed in on a need that locally-raised scientists failed to recognise?

This combination of open borders for STEM professionals and international collaboration on expensive projects proves if anything that science cannot be separated from society as a whole. Publically-funded research requires not only a government willing to see beyond its short-term spell in office but a level of state education that satisfies the general populace as to why public money should be granted for such undertakings. Whilst I have previously discussed the issues surrounding the use of state funding for mega-budget research with no obvious practical application, the merits of each project should still be discussed on an individual basis. In addition, and as a rule of thumb, it seems that the larger the project, the almost certain increase in the percentage of non-nationals required to staff it.

The anti-Brexit views of prominent British scientists such as Brian Cox and the Astronomer Royal, Lord Rees of Ludlow, are well known. Let's just hope that the rising xenophobia and anti-immigration feeling that led to Brexit doesn't stand for 'brain exit'. There's been enough of that already and no nation - not even the USA - has enough brain power or funding to go it alone on the projects that really need prompt attention (in case you're in any doubt, alternative energy sources and climate change mitigation spring to mind). Shortly before the Brexit referendum, Professor Stephen Hawking said: "Gone are the days when we could stand on our own, against the world. We need to be part of a larger group of nations." Well if that's not obvious, I don't know what is!

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Or who validates popular science books?)

Gandhi once said "learn as if you were to live forever", but for the non-scientist interested in gaining accurate scientific knowledge this can prove rather tricky. Several options are available in the UK, most with drawbacks: there are few 'casual' part-time adult science courses (including the Open University); the World Wide Web is useful but inhibits organised, cohesive learning and there's always the danger of being taken in by some complete twaddle; whilst television documentaries and periodicals rarely delve into enough detail. This only leaves the ever-expanding genre of popular science books, with the best examples often including the false starts and failed hypotheses that make science so interesting.

However, there is a problem: if the book includes mistakes then the general reader is unlikely to know any better. I'm not talking about the usual spelling typos but more serious flaws concerning incorrect facts or worse still, errors of emphasis and misleading information. Admittedly the first category can be quite fun in a 'spot the mistake' sort of way: to have the particle physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw inform you that there were Muslims in the second century AD, as they do in Why does E=mc2? (and why should we care?) helps to make the authors a bit more human. After all, why should a physicist also have good historical knowledge? Then again, this is the sort of fact that is extremely easy to verify, so why wasn't this checked in the editing process? You expect Dan Brown's novels to be riddled with scientific errors, but are popular science book editors blind to non-science topics?

Since the above is an historical error many readers may be aware of the mistake, but the general public will often not be aware of inaccuracies relating to scientific facts and theories. Good examples of the latter can be found in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, the bestselling popular science book in the UK in 2005. As a non-scientist Bryson admits that it's likely to be full of "inky embarrassments" and he's not wrong. For instance, he makes several references to the DNA base Thymine but at one point calls it Thiamine, which is actually Vitamin B1. However, since Bryson is presenting themed chapters of facts (his vision of science rather than any explanation of methods) these are fairly minor issues and don't markedly detract from the substance of the book.

So far that might seem a bit nitpicky but there are other works containing more fundamental flaws that give a wholly inaccurate description of a scientific technique. My favourite error of this sort can be found in the late Stephen Jay Gould's Questioning the Millennium and is howler that continues to astonish me more than a decade after first reading. Gould correctly states that raw radiocarbon dates are expressed as years BP (Before Present) but then posits that this 'present' relates directly to the year of publication of the work containing that date. In other words, if you read a book published in AD 2010 that refers to the date 1010 BP, the latter year is equivalent to AD 1000; whereas for a book published in AD 2000, 1010 BP would equate to AD 990. It's astounding that Gould, who as a palaeontologist presumably had some understanding of other radiometric dating methods, could believe such a system would be workable. The 'present' in the term BP was fixed at AD 1950 decades before Gould's book was published, so it doubly astonishes that no-one questioned his definition. You have to ask were his editors so in awe that they were afraid to query his text, or did his prominence give him copy-editing control of his own material? A mistake of this sort in a discipline so close to Gould's area of expertise can only engender doubt as to the veracity of his other information.

A more dangerous type of error is when the author misleads his readership through personal bias presented as fact. This is particularly important in books dealing with recent scientific developments as there will be few alternative sources for the public to glean the information from. In turn, this highlights the difference between professionals and their peer-reviewed papers and the popularisations available to the rest of us. There is an ever-increasing library of popular books discussing superstrings and M-theory but most make the same mistake of promoting this highly speculative branch of physics not just as the leading contender in the search for a unified field theory, but as the only option. Of course a hypothesis that cannot be experimentally verified is not exactly following a central tenet of science anyway. There has been discussion in recent years of a string theory Mafia so perhaps this is only a natural extension into print; nonetheless it is worrying to see a largely mathematical framework given so much premature attention. I suppose only time will tell...

It also appears that some publishers will accept material from senior but non-mainstream scientists on the basis of the scientist's stature, even if their hypotheses border on pseudoscience. The late Fred Hoyle was a good example of a prominent scientist with a penchant for quirky (some might say bizarre) ideas such as panspermia, who although unfairly ignored by the Nobel Committee seems to have had few problems getting his theories into print. Another example is Elaine Morgan, who over nearly four decades has written a string of volumes promoting the aquatic ape hypothesis despite lack of evidence in the ever-increasing fossil record.

But whereas Hoyle and Morgan's ideas have long been viewed as off the beaten track, there are more conventional figures whose popular accounts can be extremely misleading, particularly if they promote the writer's pet ideas over the accepted norm. Stephen Jay Gould himself frequently came in for criticism for overemphasising various evolutionary methods at the expense of natural selection, yet his peers' viewpoint is never discussed in his popular writings. Another problem can be seen in Bryan Sykes's The Seven Daughters of Eve, which received enormous publicity on publication as it gratifies our desire to understand human origins. However, the book includes a jumbled combination of extreme speculation and pure fiction, tailored in such a way as to maximise interest at the expense of clarification. Some critics have argued the reason behind Sykes's approach is to promote his laboratory's mitochondrial DNA test, capable of revealing which 'daughter' the customer is descended from. Scientists have to make a living like everyone else, but this commercially-driven example perhaps sums up the old adage that you should never believe everything you read. The Catch-22 of course is that unless you understand enough of the subject beforehand, how will you know if a popular science book contains errors?

A final example does indeed suggest that some science books aimed at a general audience prove to be just too complex for comprehensive editing by anyone other than the author. I am talking about Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. At over one thousand pages this great tome is marketed with the sentence "No particular mathematical knowledge on the part of the reader is assumed", yet I wonder whether the cover blurb writer had their tongue firmly in their cheek? It is supposed to have taken Penrose eight years to write and from my occasional flick-throughs in bookshops I can see it might take me that long to read, never mind understand. I must confess all those equations haven't really tempted me yet, at least not until I have taken a couple of Maths degrees...