Walport calls for international collaboration during US visit

The chief executive of UK Research and Innovation has pressed for more international collaboration at a meeting of scientific world leaders, amid increasing uncertainty over the UK’s future relations with the European Union.

Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Washington DC, Mark Walport said there was “still too much of a problem” when it came to collaboration on global challenges such as clean growth.

Collaboration, he suggested, should be done in “domain-specific areas” rather than through a general body, using the Ebola outbreak as an example where this had worked well in the past.