BRITAIN MUST MAKE close scientific ties with China, the UK’s top scientist urged in the Times of London today.

Universities in the UK are “increasingly third-worldish” in comparison with Chinese counterparts, said Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize for Science winner who is shortly to take Isaac Newson’s chair at the Royal Society, the world’s most venerable science club.

Sir Paul said he had been to Chinese science hubs. “If you go now to try and visit the growing science cities, they are incredibly impressive. When I go and visit our universities and look at the infrastructure that we’ve got, it is looking increasingly third-worldish to me in comparison.”

China took research seriously, unlike the UK, where the universities were struggling, and the US, where funding decisions were made according to politics, leading to cuts in vital areas such as climate science.

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CHINESE ‘ARE ALL SPIES’

But aren’t the Chinese all spies? Sir Paul said the accusations of Chinese spying in the science arena made no sense. Science worked by researchers openly publishing their results, so “discovery science is all open anyway”, he told the newspaper.

As for other forms of spying, he dismissed the implications that only one side did it: “The first thing is we do have to be realistic. We will spy on each other. So let’s not get too moral about it.”

The rebuke was interesting, given that it was published in the Times, which regularly prints evidence-free accusations of Chinese spying, usually quoting anti-China campaigner Luke de Pulford while covering up the fact that his funding comes from the CIA-adjacent NED.

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WHERE POLITICS OVERRULES SCIENCE

While China is painted as a place where political considerations overrule science, it’s actually the United States where that happens.

“The political climate in the US risked accelerating the shift away from the West,” the Times report said, summarizing Sir Paul’s views, and adding a direct quote: “I go often to the US. There’s no question about it: scientists there are scared.”

Sir Paul said that unlike the UK’s leaders, the leadership in China “sees that science is going to drive their economy … it’s like chalk and cheese, the thinking”.

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CHINA APPROACHING IS VISIBLY WORKING

In 2023, Sir Paul led a review of the UK scientific research scene, which printed a grim picture of a sector which was “fragile, in jeopardy and needs fixing”, the Times said.

“By contrast, China’s focus is already paying dividends. The same year as Nurse’s review, it overtook the US for the first time in the Nature Index, a benchmark that tracks high-quality papers in leading journals across the life sciences, physics, chemistry and earth and environmental sciences.”

But while China produces more top-tier studies than any other country, the US still leads in health research, the paper said.

Author: Saikat Bhattacharya