Below is the text of an essay I wrote for the progress fellowship exploring the idea of a "sovereign innovation fund" as a means to capture and reinvest the value generated from the UK's export of human capital and inventions. I welcome feedback/criticism.

A proposal for a UK 'sovereign innovation fund'

In 2016 — a biochemistry degree and a few sporadic internships behind me — I gave up on my search for a full-time biotech job in the UK. My last interview before I left the country was an onsite with the cancer drug developer Immunocore in a leafy business park outside of Oxford. After Immunocore rejected me, my university careers service suggested I try finance instead; an accountancy training scheme with one of the Big Four, perhaps, like many of my peers. Unwilling to compromise, I left the UK to try my luck in Switzerland.

At face value, my experience seems at odds with the narrative of the UK as a science superpower. The UK excels at producing students, researchers, and research output: UK scientists publish 6% of scientific papers (#3 in the world), its degree programs are first-class, and the UK biobank and NHS supply deep wells of quality biomedical data. The UK leads Europe in both discovering new drugs and founding biotech start-ups (although it lags far behind the US).

At the time, leaving the UK felt like a personal failure. In retrospect, it worked out well; I was more competitive abroad, where the supply of life science graduates is better matched to demand. The UK directly employs only 70,000 people in its pharmaceuticals sector, versus 900,000 in the US. Contrast this number with the 630,000 students of medicine or biological sciences at UK universities. This oversupply suppresses wages and leads to misallocation of talent into sectors that don’t suit their skills or interests: only 16% of UK biological science graduates are employed in “highly skilled” STEM jobs 6 months after graduating.

Reductively, the lack of biotech jobs stems from the lack of big domestic employers. Alongside the legacy pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and GSK (est. 1913 and 1873, respectively), I know of only one other independent commercial-stage drug developer headquartered in the UK: Immunocore.

These ‘missing’ employers are ultimately a reflection of the UK’s poor performance when it comes to commercialising its ideas: there’s a “valley of death” between ...

Posts

Wiki Contributions

Comments