A physicist and cosmologist.
26 February 2026
A shortened version of this letter was published in The Guardian.
To the Editor,
I am a postdoctoral researcher in cosmology working in Manchester, and I would like to say something about the recent STFC funding crisis.
I am not entirely sure why I feel compelled to write about the UK public policy. I grew up in China, where discussions about policy can sometimes feel like discussions about the weather: when the sun shines, one praises and enjoys it; when storms come, one avoids them and complains — but few imagine they can change the weather. I suspect I still carry some of that temperament.
So I am not writing in the grand hope of shaping the long-term national strategy or securing scientific prosperity. Rather — as with any piece of scientific work — I believe certain perspectives deserve to exist in the discussion. Mine happens to be that of an international, early-career scientist working in the UK. It may be somewhat representative. And I admit, I find it mildly amusing to imagine the surprise on my colleagues’ faces when they see a Chinese postdoc writing in a British newspaper.
I would like to make three points.
First: the key to scientific investment is not only the size of the cake, but the stability of its supply.
Sudden expansions and contractions in funding are both dangerous. You can starve the young, or you can suffocate them. Academic ecosystems are not built overnight, particularly in science and engineering. From the cultivation of interest to intellectual maturity, it often takes a decade for a scientist to become fully independent. Violent short-term fluctuations are therefore deeply damaging — especially when marginal investment is primarily investment in people.
Abrupt funding shifts distort the talent market, creating mismatches between expertise and opportunity. The result is not efficiency, but waste — of training, of potential, and of the very human capital that advanced research depends upon.
Second: how should a country respond to technological revolutions?
When Americans invented a sturdy gold shovel and rented it out at high prices, Chinese manufacturers produced competitive alternatives and distributed the blueprints so that anyone in the world could build their own. In such a situation, should the UK focus on inventing ever more sophisticated shovels, or on digging for gold? Perhaps both. But surely it would be unwise to reduce the number of people digging while concentrating resources solely on designing new tools.
Incidentally, one of those gold mines is called curiosity-driven science.
Third: science has always been, at its best, a refuge.
I sometimes think of a night many years ago in Paris, standing on the Pont des Arts under a full moon with my PhD supervisor — a lovely, now late, English gentleman. He joked that the three of us there (including his girlfriend) were, respectively, refugees of Johnson, Xi, and Trump. It was light-hearted, but not entirely unserious.
Paris, for many years, has served as a haven for us citizens of the Universe. Should not a mature and prosperous nation — one that has benefited from the longest arc of industrial and intellectual accumulation — aspire to be a refuge for those who expand the frontiers of human knowledge?
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