Stephen Bustin PhD FRSB MAE
Professor of Molecular Medicine, Anglia Ruskin University, United Kingdom
13th September 2025
Britain’s Vanishing Science Base
Brexit, broken funding and empty slogans are dismantling the very system that once made Britain a science powerhouse.
It is 2025 and the UK’s claim to be a “science superpower” looks increasingly hollow. Pharmaceutical companies are pulling research and development out of Britain, taking with them skilled jobs, clinical trials and access to new medicines. The press releases talk of “global portfolio optimisation” and “strategic realignment.” The reality is more blunt: fewer opportunities for patients to benefit from cutting-edge therapies, and fewer secure careers for the scientists who once made the UK a hub for innovation. This retreat has been years in the making. Brexit destroyed our positive grant balance with the EU and erected barriers that make it harder for postdocs to come here and harder for ours to go there. Universities face a funding crisis, while young researchers are stuck with insecure contracts, low salaries and unmanageable debt. Now, with pharma retreating, one of the few routes out of that insecurity is closing. Start-ups, much touted as the solution, are not a substitute: they are fragile, rarely internationally competitive, and do not generate jobs on the scale that industry once did. The result is a slow hollowing out. Britain still has world-class universities and laboratories, but without stability and investment, their discoveries will be developed elsewhere. And soon it will not just be that our scientists leave. It will be that a generation is never educated here in the first place.
The irony is that my own generation was given every opportunity. We paid no tuition fees, received grants to study, and entered a system that still offered the prospect of a secure academic or industrial career. What do first-year students see today? Debt, short-term contracts, shrinking prospects and now the disappearance of the industrial jobs that once offered an alternative to academia. And our Prime Minister, ministers and MPs, all of whom enjoyed these benefits, keep the drawbridge pulled up behind them.
Yet decline is not inevitable. The solutions are straightforward, if politically inconvenient. Rejoin Horizon Europe fully and restore the freedom of researchers to move in and out of the UK. Stabilise university funding and stop relying on overseas student fees as a survival strategy. Replace insecure short-term contracts with sustainable research careers. Make the UK worth pharma’s while again by offering a predictable regulatory environment, faster trial approvals through the NHS, and a clear national framework for drug pricing. And above all, stop fetishising start-ups as if they can replace the scale and stability of industrial R&D.
Britain still has extraordinary scientists, laboratories and ideas. But without a government prepared to move beyond empty slogans and offer a genuine vision for science, those strengths will be wasted. Knowledge is universal and does not belong to one country. Yet Britain has always been known for attracting the best minds and working with them to move science forward while also enriching this country. How can we abandon all that?
8th September 2025
When Bad Science Fuels a Public Health Crisis
It is 2025 and children are dying of measles in Europe and the United States.
Once-eradicated diseases are in danger of returning. And in a staggering policy reversal, some US states are now starting to roll back long-standing childhood vaccine mandates.
The consequences will be catastrophic, but they did not come out of nowhere. They are the aftershocks of a failure that began more than two decades ago, when a single scientific paper helped ignite a global wave of vaccine hesitancy.
In 2002, a peer-reviewed publication claimed to have found traces of measles virus in the gut tissue of children with autism. The result appeared to bolster the false belief that the MMR vaccine might somehow cause autism. The findings were based on laboratory tests, but the study was based on a combination of wrong data, contamination as well as selective and misleading reporting. The results were never replicated, whilst hundreds of reports involving hundreds of thousands of children demonstrated the opposite. And yet, the damage was done.
Two decades later, we are still living with the consequences. In the United States, vaccine refusal is now a mainstream political identity and measles outbreaks have returned there as well as in Europe. And globally, trust in public health guidance has been fractured. That a single study could ignite such long-lasting harm might seem absurd. But the real absurdity is that the problems behind that paper were not unique. Scientists knew then, as they do now, that many biomedical studies rest on shaky foundations.
Generally, the issue is not fraud. It is more insidious than that. It is the quiet corrosion of scientific standards under the weight of institutional pressure. Today, scientists are judged not by the quality of their work but by the quantity: how many papers they publish, how much funding they bring in, how frequently they are cited. Time-consuming work that involves numerous controls, validating methods and verifying results, often comes second to speed and impact. Coupled with the tendency of funders to reward novelty and the publicity generated by bold claims, this means that the need for scientific rigour is often overlooked.
Conventional media have not helped as scientific findings are now press-released before they are peer-reviewed, preliminary results are treated uncritically as breakthroughs and equal time is given to proven expert opinions and pub-originated beliefs. And then comes the backlash, amplified and accelerated by social media, which thrive on outrage, distrust and conspiracy. In that environment, science no longer appears cautious and self-correcting. It looks contradictory, politicised and incoherent. And these cracks are then politicised and exploited by reckless narcissistic politicians.
Take the COVID-19 pandemic. The scale-up of testing was, by any measure, an extraordinary achievement. Within weeks, laboratories around the world were detecting a novel virus with impressive speed and accuracy. But beneath the surface, a longstanding issue re-emerged: the technology powering those tests, the polymerase chain reaction or PCR, was already known to be problematic. For years, researchers had warned that PCR was frequently misused. Poor test designs, weak validation and opaque reporting had become common. Together with a group of international experts, I helped publish a set of guidelines in 2009 on how to conduct and report these types of experiments. Despite nearly 20,000 citations, they remain widely ignored. During the pandemic, those technical shortcomings collided with political urgency and media sensationalism. False positives, conflicting test results and confusing terminology all fuelled suspicion. The fact that most tests worked well became irrelevant. What lingered in the public imagination were the failures and these were, and indeed still are, exaggerated and weaponised.
This is what happens when science fails to fix its own house. The credibility we take for granted can erode quickly. Not because the public are anti-science, but because we gave them too many reasons to be sceptical. Fixing it will not be easy. But it starts with humility. With a willingness to look critically at the tools we use and the culture we have built around them. And with an understanding that scientific integrity is not just about avoiding fraud. It is about valuing precision over prestige, transparency over trendiness and trustworthiness over speed. We cannot afford to get this wrong again.