When Theresa May sketched out her vision for a vibrant post-Brexit economy last year, the Wellcome Sanger Institute was exactly the sort of place she had in mind. Based on a state-of-the-art campus just outside Cambridge, the institute played a key role in decoding the human genome. Today, it is at the centre of the UK’s foremost biotech cluster, a sector given top billing in the government’s industrial strategy.

In recent months, however, the scientists have been cursing an immigration cap brought in by May while she was home secretary, which has been blamed for aggravating a staffing crisis across a swathe of industry, as well as the NHS.

In December, after months of searching, the institute offered a software developer from India a job