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Boris Johnson’s first speech as prime minister on 24 July was notable for mentioning a sweep of scientific and technological advances that he sees as unique to Britain. These ranged from gene therapy treatments for blindness to satellites orbiting in space, but is Britain really “leading the world” in these areas, and how will they be affected by Brexit?

“Using gene therapy for the first time to treat the most common form of blindness”

This is a reference to a genetic therapy treatment for age-related blindness which aims to preserve sight by halting the deterioration of cells in the eye’s retina. One of the most common forms of sight loss, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affects about 600,000 people in the UK. In February, a woman from Oxford became the first person to receive this gene therapy treatment. If the trial is successful, it could preserve vision in people who would otherwise go blind.

The treatment was manufactured by Gyrocope Therapeutics which is funded by Syncona, an investment firm founded by the Wellcome Trust. In its most recent financial results, Syncona identified “political and economic uncertainty, including impacts from the EU referendum” as one of the “potential risks to research funding and so the pipeline of attractive opportunities; to attracting talent and so the ability to build successful businesses […] or to profitably commercialise new products.”


Eliza Manningham-Buller, the chair of the Wellcome Trust (which owns about a third of Syncona), recently sent a letter to Boris Johnson warning that leaving the EU without a deal would threaten the £1 billion in funding that it provides to support research – like Syncona’s gene therapy treatments.

Robert MacLaren, the ophthalmologist who lead the team which is carrying out the AMD gene therapy trial, also lead another groundbreaking gene therapy trial at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London that has given hope to those with choroideremia, a degenerative genetic disease that causes blindness. People with the condition have a mutation in a gene called CHM – or are missing the gene altogether. After modifying a virus to deliver new DNA to the back of the retina, the cells adopt the material and are permanently changed. Everyone on the trial maintained or improved their vision for up to five years after the operation.

MacLaren did much of this work at Moorfields Eye Hospital, and like many scientific institutions, Moorfields has received grants and funding from the European Union – including more than €16 million to support research into treatments for the retina. It also employs many non-UK EU nationals, who constitute up to 20 per cent of the hospital’s entire staff. In a freedom of information request by campaign group Best for Britain, the hospital identified a “possible negative impact to our workforce” as one of Brexit’s risks to its operations.

“… leading the world in battery technology”

In 1980, John Goodenough discovered lithium cobalt oxide at the University of Oxford, and invented the technology necessary for lithium-ion batteries. Unfortunately for the UK economy, it was then Sony that commercialised the technology, and the UK saw very little direct commercial benefit. This trend continues to be true of the impending shift to all-electric vehicles. The Telegraph, for which Boris Johnson is a columnist, said in May, “the UK is still very much in the slow lane in the race for next generation automotive technology”.

The UK has been trying to turn this situation around for some time. Since 2011, the government has invested significant amounts to subsidise plug-in cars. In 2017, it announced an investment of £246 million for battery research and to create the yet-to-be-built UK Battery Industrialisation Centre in Coventry to provide testing facilities. The government has also spent £400 million on electric car charging infrastructure.

This investment is necessary to encourage investment in electric cars, which is needed if the government is to meet its pledge to ban internal combustion engine cars by 2040 and match its net-zero CO2 emissions target by 2050.

However, UK investment is dwarfed by state and private investment in battery technology projects in the US, China and elsewhere in Europe. The French government, for instance, has pledged €2.5 billion over 10 years. Investors have also poured more than $19 billion into Tesla, which has been supported by huge tax credits and hundreds of millions in taxpayer-funded subsidies for its cars.

Tesla is constructing a $4 billion “gigafactory” with Panasonic to manufacture batteries on a new and unprecedented scale, and China has similarly ambitious plans to maintain its 60 per cent share of global lithium-ion battery production. Volkwagen is spending €20 billion on batteries for its all-electric cars, and is involving companies in China and South Korea.

The UK, however, is home to smaller-scale projects like Nissan’s packing of Japanese cells for its all-electric Leaf, Jaguar Land Rover’s £1 billion investment to produce hybrid and electric engines, and Aston Martin’s plans to produce its batteries for high-end luxury cars.

One of the biggest factors limiting the UK’s progress with battery technology and adoption of electric cars has been uncertainty over Brexit. External investment into the UK automotive sector, which includes petrol, diesel and electric technology, has dropped 80 per cent since the referendum result in 2016. As for John Goodenough, he moved to Austin, Texas in 1992, where he is working on an idea for a “super-battery”.

“… liberate the UK’s extraordinary bioscience sector from anti-genetic modification rules…”

Current EU rules mean that the UK can grow and sell any genetically modified crop that has been shown to be safe for consumption. However, GM plants are only currently grown in the UK for research purposes, not for food. This isn’t down to EU rules – it’s more due to an unwillingness to market GM foods to a population that has been resistant to the idea in the past.

In the wake of Johnson’s speech, plant scientists have expressed concern over proposals to weaken the current EU rules, as these ensure safety. Any change to such rules would be unlikely to tackle the wider issue of anti-GM public opinion.

“… let’s develop the blight-resistant crops that will feed the world…”

The UK has a relatively strong agricultural research base and, in 2014, a UK trial successfully cultivated GM blight-resistant potatoes. None of this has been done in opposition to the EU, which approved this and a subsequent trial, currently under way at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich.

It has been estimated that growing a GM pest-resistant crop like this in the UK could save about £60 million a year in pesticide use, but there aren’t any specific EU regulations stopping this from happening. It remains to be seen if the UK really does come out in support of GM crops after Brexit, or whether we have been using the EU as an excuse all this time.

“Let’s get going now on our own positioning, navigation and timing satellites, and Earth observation systems – UK assets, orbiting space with all the long-term strategic and commercial benefits for this country”

Thanks to Brexit, UK suppliers have already been excluded from military aspects of the €10 billion Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System, a rival to the US Global Positioning System designed to provide positioning and navigation services to the military, commercial organisations and individuals with mobile phones.

The UK has contributed £1 billion towards the project, and it could ask for a rebate as part of Brexit negotiations. Suppliers to the project have already started moving their work to the European continent so they can continue working on the contract, taking expertise out of the country.

This is at odds to the UK’s aims to own 10 per cent of the global space market by 2030. There are plans to set up a National Space Council with £20 million of funding, and establish a launch site for small satellites. Theresa May announced in 2018 that the UK would build its own navigation system, but such a feat is likely to cost £3 billion to £5 billion.

An extract from Boris Johnson’s first speech as prime minister where he mentions science and technology “We know the enormous strength of this economy, in life sciences, in tech, in academia, music, the arts, culture, financial services. It is here, in Britain, that we are using gene therapy for the first time to treat the most common form of blindness. Here, in Britain, we are leading the world in battery technology that will help cut CO2, and tackle climate change, and produce green jobs for the next generation.” “And as we prepare for a post-Brexit future, it is time we look not at the risks, but at the opportunities that are upon us. So let us begin work now to create free ports that will drive jobs and create thousands of high-skilled jobs in left-behind areas. Let’s start now to liberate the UK’s extraordinary bioscience sector from anti-genetic modification rules, and let’s develop the blight-resistant crops that will feed the world. Let’s get going now on our own positioning, navigation and timing satellites, and Earth observation systems – UK assets, orbiting space with all the long-term strategic and commercial benefits for this country.”

We clarified the EU's current stance on GM crops. We corrected the gene therapy the Prime Minister is likely referring to, and provided more detail on it.