In March, I was given a great scientific opportunity: a €2.5m grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to study how disease-causing bacteria swap genes with each other to become more infective, or evade treatments such as antibiotics. The ERC advanced grant is a very prestigious award, and it meant that I and the scientists at my lab at Imperial College London could finally get to work on questions and experiments we had been planning for the past few years.
But just a few weeks later I was informed that the funding was in jeopardy. Because the UK failed to negotiate an agreement to remain in the EU’s Horizon Europe funding programme – which it had previously committed to doing – my grant, along with those of 142 other UK-based scientists, couldn’t be taken up in this country.
